Away We Go

Away We Go

Burt and Verona are a couple of characters you rarely see in the movies thirtysomething, educated, healthy, self-employed, gentle, thoughtful, whimsical, not neurotic and really truly in love. Their big concern is finding the best place and way to raise their child who is still a bun in the oven. For every one person like this I’ve seen in the last 12 months 20? 30? mass murderers.

“Away We Go,” directed by Sam Mendes from an original script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida (both novelists and magazine publishers), is a film for nice people to see. Nice people also go to “Terminator Salvation,” but it doesn’t make them any nicer. “Away We Go” opened last week in New York and Los Angeles after lukewarm reviews accusing Verona and Burt of being smug, superior and condescending. These are not sins if you have something to be smug about and much reason to condescend.

Are the supporting characters caricatures or simply a cross-section of the kinds of grotesques we usually meet in movies? I use the term grotesque as Sherwood Anderson does in Winesburg, Ohio: a person who has one characteristic exaggerated beyond all scale with the others.

Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) live not far from his parents, in an underheated shabby home with a cardboard-covered window. “We don’t live like grown-ups,” Verona observes. It’s not that they can’t afford better; more that they are stalled out at student poverty level; now that they’re about to become parents, they can’t keep adult life on hold.

“Away We Go” is about an unplanned odyssey they take around North America to visit friends and family members essentially doing some comparison shopping among lifestyles. Her parents are dead, so they begin with his: Gloria (Catherine O’Hara) and Jerry (Jeff Daniels). The parents truly are self-absorbed, and have no wish to wait around to welcome their first grandchild. They’re moving to Antwerp.

Verona is of mixed race, and Gloria asks her conversationally, “Will the baby be black?” Is this insensitive? Why? Parents on both sides of an interracial couple would naturally wonder, and the film’s ability to ask the question is not racist, but matter of fact in a America slowly growing tolerant. In moments like that, Eggers and Vida reflect a society in which race is no longer the primary defining characteristic.

After Belgium wins the parental vote, Burt and Verona head for Phoenix and a visit with her onetime boss Lily (Allison Janney) and her husband Lowell (Jim Gaffigan). Lily is a monster a daytime alcoholic whose speech is grossly offensive and her husband and children are in shock. They flee to Madison, where Burt’s childhood friend Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has changed her name to “LN” and become one of those rigid campus feminists who have banned human nature from their rule book.

Then it’s off to Montreal for friends from college Tom and Munch (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey), who are unhappily convinced they’re happy; next down to Miami, where Burt’s brother has been abandoned by his wife; there’s not a single example of healthy parenting in the lot of them.

The unmarried couple Verona and Burt have one of those relationships that appear so perfect it is almost infuriating, and like everything else in their lives they can take it anywhere. So they transport themselves to a place where the sun never stops shining. They have been called improbably ideal, and you know what? So are Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, who wrote the screenplay. They are both novelists (and essayists) in their 30s with two children: he publishes McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; she edits The Believer.

They’re into having fun, but they also care about the world. Consider his great project “826 Valencia,” a storefront operation in San Francisco among other cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Boston and Ann Arbor, Mich. that offers free tutoring and writing workshops to kids from age 6 through 18 (the pirate-store front part is in S.F.). Yes. With eye patches and parrot perches and beard dye for sale upstairs; yes.

I submit that Eggers and Vida are good people. And if their characters find themselves better than many other people around them well then maybe they are. “This movie does not like you,” sniffs Tony Scott of the New York Times. Maybe with good reason.

Watch Away We Go For Free On Gomovies.