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Away We Go: Never Gets to the Heart of Its Paralyzed Heroes

John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph wander through their repetitive journey without ever having to meaningfully resolve their established character conflicts.

There’s an awkward, protracted monologue in the middle of Away We Go that exemplifies the movie’s overall inability to answer any one of the endless questions posed throughout its running time. It's delivered by seemingly happy husband and father Tom Garnett (Chris Messina) in an effort to explain the secrets of successfully raising a family to hapless, expectant parents Burt and Verona (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) at late-night diner breakfast. I can’t remember the exact details of the monologue offhand but the gist of it goes something like this: the pancakes represent the foundation of the house, toothpicks represent the people in the house, sugar cubes represent the roof over the house and maple syrup represents the underlying love. Tom talks and talks, he makes comparison after comparison, and at the end of it all, the entire thing boils down to the following message: “Love is the glue that holds it all together.” The players all sit around the table in reverential silence and nod their heads as if something of deep substance was uttered - all the while, we the viewers are left to wonder just what (if anything) has shifted in the course of this scene or how our fumbling heroes have undergone any relevant change with regards to their overall mission. How does it help them? How does it hinder them? In what way does it impact their ongoing struggles? And, more importantly, how does it shed any specific, insightful light on the topic of raising a family? Away We Go is filled with all sorts of similarly chatty but empty platitudes - screenwriters Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida seem so unsure of the intended purpose of their heroes' journey that sly observational humor and heady dialogue become smoke and mirrors to distract from the lack of any kind of meaningful conclusion.

Away We Go starts off with a straightforward enough premise: self-described “fuck-up” couple Burt and Verona find themselves shocked into reality when she becomes accidentally pregnant – with no real life roots planted, the hapless duo impulsively embarks on a road trip to visit assorted loved ones and to hopefully discover the community that will finally inspire them to build the kind of stable home necessary for raising a child. The movie makes all kinds of noise about the issues that have been holding our heroes back in life – she’s a shrewish, tightly-wound abstract artist who has never allowed herself to truly grieve her parents’ untimely death; he’s a foppish, well-meaning but largely ineffectual salesman who lacks the masculine fortitude to take an emotional stand in his career, his marriage or his strained familial relationships - but then fails to force either of them to actively resolve any one of these internal conflicts. Eggers and Vida skirt the issue here and there – Verona resists her younger sister’s appeal to mourn the loss of their parents together, Burt fumbles an opportunity advance his career – but they never take the plunge into the deeper questions posed by their own material: Why has Burt pursued this career path in the first place? Why does he choose to fight an uphill professional battle that clearly provides no personal satisfaction? What hesitations or insecurities prevent him from stepping into a deeper life purpose? Why is Verona so afraid of finally releasing her parents? In what ways does this loss make her scared to love? In other words: what are the real, underlying reasons these two have allowed themselves to get stuck and what do they need to do to get unstuck?

In lieu of answering these questions, the movie instead makes an abrupt shift into the world of dysfunctional parenting. Burt and Verona visit a series of family members and friends who collectively make up a grotesque catalogue of how to brutalize your children, ranging from incestuous, New Age spirituality to alcoholic emotional abuse. It remains very unclear just how any of this relates to our “fuck-up” couple and their established crisis beyond the very nebulous idea that perhaps they might be such fuck-ups after all (and, really, do we need a whole movie to make this very simple, generalized point?). We’re never treated to the anticipated fall-out from Burt’s job performance failure – but there is an uncomfortable lunch with alcoholic friends in Phoenix; there’s no acknowledgement of Verona’s quiet anger but there is a secretly unhappy adoptive mother who longs to conceive children of her own in Canada. It’s all makes for a discombobulated, repetitive movie that dances around the issues without ever coming to a clear conclusion about them.

By the end of the journey, the movie half-asses a meaningful character arc with Verona’s decision to symbolically embrace her painful past by reclaiming her abandoned childhood home in Louisiana – but we really have no sense of how or why these two earned this resolution. They really seem no different at the end of the movie as they did at the beginning – there is never a clear turning point or catalyst for their empowering change and there is likewise no apparent reason why they could not have made the same decision much, much earlier. The movie sets up a core idea about life paralysis but then fails to bring that idea to true, resonant, logical life.

Directed by: Sam Mendes
Written by: Dave Eggers
Starring: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph

July 22, 2009