“Away We Go” (2009)

Directed by Sam Mendes
Staring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph

This was a film I really wanted to see when it first came out but never got around to. If John Craven was a demographic that Hollywood coveted, this movie is probably what some exec would have put together for a focus group. “Okay, boys, consider this: a script by David Eggers , you know, the guy who wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that one book about his younger brother who he didn’t really raise, right? And then you add a guy from the sitcom The Office and a female alum of Saturday Night Live, and they go on a road trip where they meet with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Catherine O’Hara , and finally there’s a tearjerker scene at the end. Oh yeah, and this road trip is sort of funny but also kind of sad.” Yeah, that’s basically my Transformers.

So how did it turn out? Well, I would have preferred seeing the guy who played Dwight Shrute and Ana Gasteyer (or better yet, Gareth and Molly Shannon!) but the casting could have been a lot worse. Maya Rudolph did a fantastically understated job. A lot of actresses would have taken the opportunities presented in this film to have a big crying meltdown or, worse yet, do the One Emo Tear thing that demonstrates they are holding it together but it is hard!* Rudolph’s take on the character is that she meets her challenges with stoicism and saves emotion for when it won’t get in her way. It’s actually this sentiment, I think, that helps to gloss over one of the major plot holes in the story (why she won’t marry Jim from The Office) (well, other than how he’s currently engaged to Pam).

In fact, I found myself wondering why so many of the funny lines were written for Jim from The Office and so few, relatively speaking, for Rudolph. Nothing against Jim from The Office, but even though he plays what amounts to the lead in a very funny comedy, his character isn’t really all that funny himself. He’s the normal guy whose normalcy makes the wacky office hijinx all the wackier. This doesn’t mean that John Krasinski isn’t capable of humor; far from it. He does seem better cast as a straight man (which he also played in Leatherheads). And I don’t think he did a particularly *bad* job delivering his lines; I just think Maya Rudolph might have been funnier with some of them.

This movie was something like a more drama-oriented version of the Harold and Kumar movies and like those movies certain actors were allowed to enter in and chew up the scenery for 15 minutes. Without giving too much away, Maggie Gyllenhaal totally stole the show during her bit. The humor level, which was a pretty steady 6 out of 10 throughout the movie, ratcheted up to a high 8 or low 9 during her part. The whole part hinted at a larger story in its own right, one that indicted liberal academia and people with goofy ideas re: parenting destined to destroy the children they are trying to rear the “right” way. The only problem was, when the scenes devoted to Gyllenhaal’s “LN” ended, the entire movie seemed to sag a little. I don’t think it really sagged – it just reverted to its pre-Maggie tone – but one wonders if the scriptwriters wouldn’t have been a little better off moving that part closer to the end or toning it down a little bit.

Overall, though, there was not a great deal wrong with this film. It didn’t have lots and lots of semi-obscure music filtering in through the breaks a la Garden State or any Wes Anderson movie but if the director had decided to do that it would have felt exactly the same. I don’t think this is the sort of thing most people are going to want to watch over and over again but it did do its job pretty well and probably warrants at least one or two revisits. Go ahead and buy this on Blu-Ray. Just don’t allow yourself to be put out when it’s one of the movies you don’t update when the next video-watching technology comes out.
*I really wanted to capitalize some of this but decided not to out of respect for Dale.

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