Family Planning as Farce in Sam Mendes’ Away We Go
As Roger Ebert begins his Great Movies essay on Hayao Miyazaki’s brilliant fantasy My Neighbor Totoro: “Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign.” He finishes by summarizing the film’s appeal: “It is a little sad, a little scary, a little surprising and a little informative, just like life itself. It depends on a situation instead of a plot, and suggests that the wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.“ (1)
Sam Mendes’ Away We Go manages a similar trick for a certain demographic of adults by largely portraying a conflict-free relationship between two thirtysomethings on the cusp of first-time parenthood. Mendes follows his Totoros (large, mythical cats in Miyazaki’s film, here an insurance salesman and medical illustrator), named Burt and Verona, as they episodically trek across the United States to find the ideal spot for bringing up a little one and settling down. Verona has a bit of baggage stemming from the premature death of her parents, but for the most part the couple lives in a hermetically sealed, dorky hipster-harmony. Conflict arises only as their bubble runs against the sharp misery of friends and extended families. "Nobody's in love like us, right?" asks Verona in a rare moment of doubt, and there's no doubt about the answer. They are engaged in a safe, passionate partnership, of which we'd all like to be a part, but rarely see borne out in films. Is this relationship any less realistic than your average romantic comedy? Not really, unless your definition of realism is aligned with the exhausted formula of beautiful, savage monodimensionals programmatically fighting and fucking and marrying and procreating.
However, for nearly an hour, Away We Go is itself an insufferably obnoxious, flat and irritatingly hip mess of a feel-bad-then-good movie. In this way it mirrors the couple (played by the The Office’s John Krasinski and Saturday Night Live alumnus Maya Rudolph) at its center: embarrassingly earnest, quirky, navel-gazing and lazily idealized. As a parade of Flagrant All-American Misery crosses the bushy-tailed couple’s path in the form of Faux-Eastern Spiritualism, Suburban Vulgarities and Narcissistic Former Hippies, Burt and Verona cling to each other against the hideous menagerie, their primary concern avoiding a similar fate for their fledgling family unit. But once the film escapes this self-imposed purgatory of misguided and deadening farce, it evolves into a near masterpiece during its final twenty minutes, leaving attentive audiences bewildered and glad they'd resisted temptation to jump ship. It’s no understatement to call this film’s first half nearly unbearable, a failure on almost every level. Its late resurrection (what sports junkies know as a “second-half adjustment”) is so glaring as to give off the appearance of an elaborate joke, though Away We Go’s finale wears a message of sincerity so brilliantly it shames the previous 70 minutes out of memory.
Narcissistic yet uncomplicated, beautiful yet average-looking, worldly yet innocent, Burt and Verona serve as the ideal for the This American Life crowd. Their unironic embrace of irony-drenched objects, activities and fashions (tube socks, aviator goggles, mittens, beards, whittling, Buddy Holly specs) would be the envy of every hipster unable to be appear so effortless in his or her appropriation of yesterday’s ephemera. Even the contrast in their names, the exotic and ethnic Verona, the prosaic Burt, projects a graceful intermarriage between the poles of hipsterdom. They are who’d you like to be, or, at the very least, who you’d like to know. The fantasy is that these people might exist, and you could befriend them, and maybe they'd rub off on you. They exist for MFA’s and graphic design grunts as Totoro does for kiddies. Which is not to criticize either the portrait or the aim, because both fantasies are ultimately harmless, equally capable of expanding one’s horizons and indulging the prospect of a better self. If one is to take umbrage with an idealizing fantasy, there are far more toxic, larger targets.
During his relatively brief career in Hollywood so far, Sam Mendes has made one vastly overrated film (the eventual kitsch-classic, Oscar Winning American Beauty in 1999), two vastly underrated films (the near-masterpiece Jarhead [2005] and 2002's enjoyable Road to Perdition), along with what is perhaps the most offensively grandiose work of Oscar-bait this decade (last year's slimy Revolutionary Road), so any film with his name on it could go either way. Cursed with the inability to transcend mediocre or vague source material, Mendes is natural visual stylist without much in the way of subtlety or originality. He has failed at sober-eyed critique and farce alike, resembling a blunt-toothed shark circling the American Dream, laboriously nibbling at it, but unable to bring it down. That he is British, yet all of his films concern Americana in its most grotesque forms, does little to propel him to the upper ranks of Hollywood Artists, his clear aim. Consequently, over the course of his first five films there has risen a consistent equation detailing the relationship between the grandness of his vision vis-à-vis The American Character and his effectiveness as a dramatist: as his ambition soars, his films sink in an equal and opposite reaction.
A great relief it is that Away We Go is much less extravagant in its sweep of the American Dream than previous efforts, especially in its splendid final reel. Aided by the brilliant director of photography Ellen Kuras, who admirably dampens his penchant for visual excess, Mendes starts off charting the revulsion Burt and Verona experience as they visit a series of friends and family that offer horrifying visions of family life. As the successive exemplars of maturity grow muted in behavior during the picture’s second half, the story’s, and Mendes’ own, better qualities emerge. Burt and Verona come across as hopelessly narcissistic and righteous when placed early on in sharp contrast to the aging slut and her basket case husband, or the anti-stroller Eastern Spiritualists. Their humanity emerges later on, when a visit to a set of ostensibly happy, Toronto-dwelling friends reveals, with utmost subtlety, unseen traumas that are neither exploited for shameless emotional punch nor parlayed into numbing farce. Similarly, the film’s final chapter, an unexpected emergency visit to Burt’s bereaved brother (played by the always-brilliant Paul Schneider) digs at deeper truths with a deft, sober humanity. The schematic of a film’s ending unintentionally humiliating the rest of its running time is a novel concept for a quirky indie comedy, even if it’s more or less expected from most quirky indie thrillers boasting lame shock endings. But the final leg of Away We Go more than justifies the price of admission. Accordingly, skipping all but this graceful stretch wouldn’t amount to tragedy. There's plenty one can do with seventy extra minutes of free time.
In a career-first, Mendes’ weaknesses and those of the script (by the presumably real-life Burt&Verona, novelists/journalists/activists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida) are complementary, and a modest dialectic emerges: the heaviness of his hand, and the self-involved, breezy flow of the script conspire to create a middle-ground synthesis that settles into a warmly restrained portrait of capital-A American Adulthood without forsaking the capital-I Idiosyncrasies of its central characters. The story of love between Burt and Verona predates and outlasts the film, as we slowly begin to feel as though we’re not witnessing their best years, a notion as refreshing as it is unfortunately unique. Essential to the veracity of Totoro, as well as Away We Go, or even Star Wars, for that matter, is the completeness of a world that doesn’t cease to exist as the film closes. Vida and Eggers should be applauded for their aversion to screenwriting contrivances, having breathed life into a humble, if initially muddled, fantasy.
Away We Go / USA, UK / 2009 / Color / 98 min. / Directed by Sam Mendes / Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida / Starring John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Carmen Ejogo, Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, Samantha Pryor, Conor Carroll, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Paul Schneider
Notes:
1 – Ebert’s discussion of Totoro, also a very good, concise explanation of Miyazaki’s overall appeal, can be accessed here:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20011223/REVIEWS08/112230301/1023
No comments:
Post a Comment