GONE BABY GONE

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

KISS KISS BANG BANG

Contemporary Children’s Cinema vs. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Unlike just about everything that passes for children’s entertainment these days, 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is both gloriously weird and genuinely mischievous. While nothing in the film offers up the sublime in quite the same manner as Pixar’s remarkable run of animated films of the past fifteen years (the safest bet for a high water mark in contemporary children’s entertainment), this film, about a crackpot inventor, his adorable kids and their customized jalopy (the onomatopoeically christened Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) redeems its utter lack of sophistication through the sheer glee it generates by simply being odd. But just like a small child’s recitation of a personal narrative, the film loses its way easily and often, strains sweetness too often, is prone to gaps in logic, and is occasionally frustrating in its inability to get to the point. That it is also capable of a jouissance nearly unthinkable in today’s market of kiddie entertainment – unforgivably congested with bratty miscreants and cuddly icons-in-waiting bound for fast food containers – mutes its comparatively trivial shortcomings.

Moreover, the film’s utter lack of willpower and restraint gradually become assets; it is as petulant and impulsive as its target audiences, and for this Chitty Chitty Bang Bang should be applauded and revived. In a brassy confluence of style, the film’s authors managed to find common ground between the absurdism of postwar British Humor, the French le fantastique, and Grimm’s fairytales, with American Tall Tales thrown in for good measure. This isn’t to say that each genre is explicitly pursued through the narrative, or that overt stylistic hallmarks can be easily pinpointed, but merely that the filmmakers successfully drew upon preexisting ideas and themes to such a dizzying extent that they produced something as familiar as it was (and is) bizarre.

Children’s entertainment has since dedicated itself to retellings of folk and classical mythology, or attempts at ironic pop hipness. The former works well with apprehensive parents keen on wholesome entertainment (while boasting a patina of esteem), while the latter is intent on blurring the line between entertainment for children and adults (the “something for everyone” family film.) If adults are to enjoy fare like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they are forced to indulge more completely the inner tyke; as such films boast no innuendos or cultural allusions with which to stoke the pop culture-infused data banks of the post-pubescent set. Ironically, it could easily be argued that this strategy ingratiates such films with adults even more so than their entendre-packed counterparts, because an escape from the oppressions of adulthood is one virtue that children’s entertainment has to offer the beleaguered parents of its target demographic. Cast in this light, it’s not hard to understand why a bizarre (and, more importantly, innocent) fantasy like Spongebob Squarepants has experienced such enduring success. Likewise, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a considerable box office success in its day, and while plenty of the snide patter that has since been marketed to children has exceeded its modest financial success, it’s not likely that these works will endure as even minor works in the history of children’s films. Instead, the plastic chotchkies bearing the likenesses of their protagonists will exist in landfills far longer than the films themselves will survive in the cultural imagination.

The plodding first half of Chitty details the life of a hapless, widowed inventor, Caractacus Potts, (played by Dick Van Dyke) and his affectionate, precocious children struggling to make ends meet in rural Great Britain. That Van Dyke’s distinctly American accent is at odds with his children’s cockney delivery barely registers as just one of the film’s thousand inconsistencies. The few satisfactory scenes in film’s first act all involve Potts' inventions, which include an elaborate Rube Goldberg-like Breakfast machine, an overeager hair cutter, a jet pack, and musical lollipops, the very things that provoke and inflame the child’s imagination. These few ingenious sight gags aside, the first hour or so of the film lack much of interest, but as Van Dyke (keeping a promise to his beloved children) restores an old jalopy for a jaunt to the beach, the film comes to life when the full capabilities of the car announce themselves in a scene of inventively staged, rotating rear-projection. As the car spreads wings and takes flight (naturally escaping from pirates), the family (accompanied by the confection heiress Truly Scrumptious [the unmemorable Sally Ann Howes]) find themselves immersed in a fantasy world, and the audience in a wonderfully goofy frolic.

Though handsomely (if often clumsily) directed by British television veteran Ken Hughes, the film’s overall spirit could more properly be attributed to co-writer Roald Dahl, who deviated noticeably from Fleming’s source novel. Dahl’s trademark brand of dark, yet winsome humor permeates the film’s far more interesting second half, though an early scene set in a candy factory calls his Willy Wonka books to mind. Hughes’ realization of his and Dahl’s screenplay benefits immensely from an aesthetic program which relies heavily on techniques borrowed from the various New Waves gaining traction worldwide at the time of the film’s production: grand, unmotivated tracking shots, quick zooms, wide angle lenses and a quicker approach to editing. The aesthetic eccentricity gives the film a roughhewn, chaotic quality that breathes life into even the most tedious subplots while reaffirming the narrative’s more radical impulses. The anarchic glee of the film is equal parts The Beatles’ Help!, and Tex Avery animation. If the film can claim a single inspiration, it would be that of Richard Lester, whose punchy delivery and schoolboy’s wit feel their way into each scene of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with nary a smirk or wink. The film is at its best when its idiosyncrasies pass by unassumingly, suffused with a characteristically dry British grin and a bouncy rhythm.

As the story-within-the-story develops, the Baron of Vulgaria and his wife, the child-hating Baroness, kidnap all the children, the grandfather, Ms. Scrumptious and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang itself at various points. A collector of wonderful machines, the Baron dispatches two classic bumbling henchmen (variation of the silent film villains fond of tying damsels to train tracks) to procure the car for his collection. The sequences in which our heroes trek through Vulgaria and the Baron’s palace are the highlights of the film. As each of Hughes and Dahl’s creative impulses crescendo, Caractacus masquerades about the palace as a staggering marionette (a ruse designed to distract the Baron) while simultaneously staging a revolt of slave children imprisoned in Vulgarian sewers. The children occupy the palace and assault the distinguished Vulgarian gentry in a gesture of juvenile anarchy reminiscent of the Jean Vigo classic Zero for Conduit. That a film designed for young people can embody the spirit of a classic film without lazy homage intended to tickle the pedantic, cinephilic synapses of older moviegoers, is an odd notion currently, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang succeeds in nodding to the Vigo masterpiece without attempting to supplant it. Hughes and Dahl don’t see the recurrence as clever, another odd notion in today’s climate of aggregate references and juxtaposition. The slightly altered and certainly modest extension of a narrative situation or creative idea apparently belongs to a bygone era, perhaps because it leaves open the possibility that the creators themselves are not in on the joke, or deceptively expect to pass the transgression by a dopey audience. Today, both audience and filmmaker seek to be on the same page, that is, both in on the joke. The self-consciousness of this attitude masks needless, counterproductive guilt, and has done nothing but detract from the formerly easygoing nature of popular entertainment, becoming especially pervasive (and proportionately repellant) in work made for children.

Late in the film, audiences are also treated to one of cinema’s most memorable maniacs: Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher, a villain authentically menacing, yet such a caricatured oddity that he fails to evoke real horror. The performance is worthy of canonization as Helpmann’s wide-eyed snarl provokes squeamishness in even the most hardened adults. Something of a dandy, the long snouted Child Catcher is the court officer responsible for sniffing out hidden children in Vulgaria so they may be apprehended and punished by the evil Baroness. Swinging his noise about in search of a child’s scent while merrily prancing through the streets of Vulgaria, the Child Catcher embodies sexual perversion and cold-blooded innocence in equal measure. A forerunner to both Pee Wee Herman and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, the Child Catcher’s anguished squeals – as he is visited by revenge at the film’s end – rival Peter Lorre’s plea for clemency before the makeshift court at the end of Fritz Lang’s M. If the film is granted one legacy let it be this character, who could equally be at ease in an episode of Star Trek, a Tolkien adaptation or a reworking of Alice in Wonderland.

The Child Catcher’s subplot, in which helpless children are tucked away in the attics, sewers and basements of Eastern Europe, pursued by half-crazed monsters, is loaded from a historical perspective, but the goofiness of the overall plot and the film’s pretzelling of time (the Baron’s court borrows elements from at least three centuries of aristocratic European décor and hosts a kind of stateless, pan-European nobility), prevent the adult viewer from pursuing strands of allegory too far.

Sadly, the film sags to lifelessness during nearly of its musical numbers, which grind the viewer’s nerves to tatters through a combination of maudlin sentimentality and poor craftsmanship (a similar blight on the adaptation, three years after this picture, of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) Exceptions of note include the title song, which is far too charming to ever be cloying, and one of the later numbers featuring a duet between the Baron and Baroness: as the two skip through a ditty of rosy-cheeked marital affection, the Baron attempts increasingly ambitious methods of murdering his wife – including a vintage trapdoor and a faulty chandelier – who cheerfully reappears ceaselessly as though spun from a Looney Tunes sketch. Had there been a few more scenes of such saccharine/macabre antics laced throughout the picture, it would be an irreproachable masterpiece. As is, warts and all, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang beats the hell out of the competition, even forty years later.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang / UK / 1968 / Color / 144 min. / Directed by Ken Hughes / Written by Mr. Hughes and Roald Dahl, from the book by Ian Fleming / Starring: Dick Van Dyke, Sally Anne Howes and Lionel Jeffries