While Away We Go offers some wonderful performances and two leads with real chemistry, it’s lacks any real dramatic development. Moreover, in its earnest desire to be this year’s Little Miss Sunshine, it passes off quirky individuality as a recipe for successful parenting.
As a matter of full disclosure, I do have to admit that my wife and I went to go see this movie because our two boys are currently visiting their grandparents. Consequently, it’s entirely possible that my simultaneous joy and loneliness at their absence affected the way I regarded this movie. But perhaps I can be forgiven for that as this is just the type of idiosyncratic observation that Dave Eggers, he co-wrote the movie with his wife, might make himself in one of his famously long prefaces. Indeed, since I’m being so honest, as a prosecutor I get kind of defensive about authors that write stories about the wrongfully convicted, not because I think the wrongfully convicted are whiners or anything. They’re not. But the people who write about them usually are, and since Dave Eggers wrote one of those books and I knew that before I went to see the movie, I may have brought that in with me, too.
But this is all very meta of me. I was going to talk about Away We Go, this quirky independent film that critics are all going to love. See, it focuses on Burt and Verona, two thirty somethings who live in a small house full of knickknacks and discarded things because they’re quirky individualists, the kind you might read about in a John Irving novel. That’s what quirky individualists do. They collect details. These details may or may not have a back story, but they suggest a fully lived and examined life. Burt and Verona have jobs, but not normal jobs. She paints pictures of the inside of people’s bodies. Who she does this for we don’t know. He sells insurance. Hold on you say, selling insurance is as normal and American as Willie Loman. Not so fast, he sells insurance to corporations, but he has to pretend to be older for his clients who have never met him because selling it the normal way wouldn’t be quirky enough. They’re pretty much a walking They Might Be Giants song.
Now before I go any further, I don’t want to give you the impression that I hate this movie the same way that I might react to Terminator Salvation or Transformers. No, those movies deserve every withering critique they get just for their empty calories. This movie is pretty charming, and John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph both turn in wonderful performances. They have great chemistry together and they really sell just how devoted they both are to each other. I don’t want to undersell this point. The thing they both do well is their quiet moments together and with their friends. It comes across as very natural and believable. Sure they have their non-crying, crying moments where their eyes well up with tears, but their faces remain placid, but that’s just so you know they can act. I would submit, they already had me in their camp before those obligatory scenes.
They are, of course, aided in their efforts to charm the pants off us by some of the punchiest dialogue ever written. Really, it’s hard not to fall in love with these two kids, particularly considering the fact that ultimately this movie, however obliquely, espouses a belief in the importance of establishing a home and values love and devotion. Kind of quaint, but an idea worth acknowledging and praising.
The problem for me was that there’s not much for these people to do in this movie other than just, you know, be . . . dear. When these two find out that Burt’s self-absorbed, baby boomer parents have decided to move to Europe, it’s a shock to their system. In a tender scene, the kind I described above, Verona turns to Burt and asks "Are we f***-ups?" This is the question that sets in motion the thematic arc, well, bump, of the movie.
Truthfully, I could’ve answered that question right then. They live in a quirky-detail packed trailer. Burt reports to people who’ve apparently never seen his face and he lies to his clients to make them thing he’s older. Verona is pregnant, but refuses to get married. No ties to their community. And their response to the obviously self-absorbed behavior of Burt’s parents is to do do something equally self-absorbed by traveling to see which friends they can live near instead of looking for a better job in an area with good schools because their plan is more adventurous. Sort of the Facebook parenting plan. Sure I’m a little traditionalist, but I’m also a parent and my magic parenthood eight-ball would answer Verona’s question with an "all signs point to yes."
By the end of the movie there’s no sense that these characters are really any different from when they ask that first question. Sure there’s some great comedy as the characters travel from place to place meeting parental caricatures. The writers take stereotypes of both red and blue state parents and amp them up to delightful effect, particularly because they have a grain of truth to them from which the writers draw. But these reflections from those "bad" parents serve to make the audience see Burt and Verona as normal and rational in comparison. They don’t create situations where the two characters can mature enough to be able to answer that nagging question that starts the adventure off. Basically it’s like one big "I’m a Mac" commercial, except we’re buying parents-to-be. We’re lead to believe they will be good and rational because they’re the goodest and rationalest of the bunch, not because their actions give us any reassurances.
Sadly, the characters distance themselves from the closest version to real parents that this movie offers. [Warning, the remainder of this review may be spoiler heavy.] We meet these parents when Burt and Verona go to Montreal to visit two of their old college friends (played poignantly by Melanie Lynskey and Chris Messina). These friends are very successful and appear to have the perfect family made up of an adorable gaggle of adopted (and diverse) children. Burt and Verona are immediately taken with the life they witness and want it for their own. But there’s a lingering sadness to the relationship, the root of which gets revealed at, of all places, an amateur strip club. These people are clearly struggling with dramatic choices, choices that our main characters don’t have to face. And our heroes in this movie basically leave them in the dust, albeit through circumstance, not necessarily by choice. To me it sent the message that their quirky individualism won’t succumb to the difficulties of marriage and parenting suffered by the rest of us sell-outs.
This leads to the scene that shows how our main characters actually choose not to grow. As sort of a "B story" throughout the movie, there’s discussion of how Verona refuses to marry Burt. It’s not because Burt isn’t totally in love with Verona, it’s because she doesn’t think it’s necessary. When our couple is confronted with the costs to the child from a marriage that crumbles, do they take a lesson from this event and decide to establish a firm commitment to each other? Of course not. Instead, they profess their love for each other as they fall asleep on a trampoline. It’s a precious scene, but it was also our last chance for these characters to learn that parenting is not all about them.
In the end, the fact that they do not get married doesn’t really matter to the story, which is why this irritated me. Presumably Verona is engaged in some internal dialogue regarding her own family that she resolves when the couple returns to the home of her deceased parents in order to make it the new home for her and Burt and their child. I say presumably because my first thought would’ve been to go for the old abandoned home I might actually already own, so I h
ave to assume that she didn’t think of that right away because she had to work through her "issues." But this dilemma is largely independent of the marriage discussion. If marriage doesn’t really matter, there was really no need to have several different characters bring it up in the story in the first place. The fact that they did makes it seem like they are trying to tell us something, particularly considering the pseudo-wedding takes place after Burt expresses his great fear that a lack of commitment can seriously damage a child. The fact that the writers answer his fears (and the audience’s) with the couple essentially saying to each other "we can do this on our own" instead of acknowledging that some things may be harder than they realize seems like anti-development to me.
I guess that’s ironic considering that this was actually written by a couple that are, you know, married. If I could be so bold as to play the hypocrisy card that the left enjoys so much these days, marriage was certainly important enough for the writers to do it. It’s being touted as written by a married writing coulple. Why then make a movie that subtly conveys the idea that marriage just isn’t that important? The anti-Prop 8 folks seem to think it’s pretty important for gay people, why isn’t it important for straight people as well?
Say what you want about how contrived and predictable The Proposal is, at the very least, Sandra Bullock’s character recognizes her own limitations and grows by the end of the movie. Like Verona in Away We Go, Margaret in The Proposal longs for a family, but she doesn’t know it. An event happens that takes her on a journey where she has to come to terms with her desire for a home. But in the end, she realizes that marriage is serious and stable family relationships are based on trust and self-sacrifice and commitment. True, the diaglogue is not nearly as clever or punchy, but the leads there are pretty charming. I’m not saying it’s a better movie, but at least it bothers to tell a story, albeit one we’ve all seen before.
Of course this could all be my problem, as I mentioned above. There was no way to seamlessly put a wedding into Away We Go without it having too Hollywood of an ending. And maybe I was thinking this was more of a romantic comedy than the dramedy it was intended to be. I mean this is pre-baby. It’s not like this was supposed to be The Squid and the Whale or The Royal Tenenbaums. So, as Dave Eggers himself might say, feel free to disregard all the parts about marriage and read only the stuff about punchy dialogue and the performances by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. Away We Go is this year’s Little Miss Sunshine, a charming and funny tale with great actors and funny dialogue about characters that take a journey and go absolutely nowhere.
I’m glad that the Disney-Rousseau piece resonated with you, R. J. I decided to make a separate article of these comments, so that more readers will see it.
I will try to write more about Rousseau in coming weeks so that more people will feel comfortable in making that connection to contemporary cultural products. The destruction of Rousseauism is an essential part of the process of restoring sense to the Western mind–assuming that it’s not already too late for that.
I figured you’d dig that. I even thought of your essay on Disney and Rousseau while I was writing it. Of course, I’m not as much of a scholar as yourself on Rousseau, so I didn’t want to risk overreaching by making the connection.
R. J., this is an absolutely brilliant review. Throughout your critique you have captured the little secret behind these seemingly raffish, charming, shaggy-dog tales. They have a message, and it is a very bad one.
To wit, they express the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which, with Marxism, is the foundation for the modern statist perversion of liberalism.
Rousseau’s fundamental idea is that humans are born good and are subsequently corrupted by society. (A common expression of an aspect of this philosophy is the idea of the “noble savage,” as is the contemporary illusion that primitive peoples are actually better than corrupt modern societies.)
This notion, which contradicts both Christianity and scientific observation, was the foundation for Romanticism in the 19th century and of the twentieth century modern-liberal notion of universal self-fulfillment, an obvious impossibility.
Note how the following statements from your review indicate this philosophy as a foundation of Away We Go:
“We’re lead to believe they will be good and rational because they’re the goodest and rationalest of the bunch, not because their actions give us any reassurances.”
That’s the modern elite notion that real self-fulfillment is manifested in, selfish, antisocial behavior. The couple’s “wisdom” is made evident by the intensity of their selfish and eccentric pursuit of self-fulfillment.
“it was also our last chance for these characters to learn that parenting is not all about them”
They make the choices they do because in fact it is all about them, and we are supposed to see that as good.
“The fact that the writers answer his fears (and the audience’s) with the couple essentially saying to each other ‘we can do this on our own’ instead of acknowledging that some things may be harder than they realize seems like anti-development to me.”
This is obvious Rousseauian thinking. Throughout the film they have been trying to have things both ways: get the benefits of modern society while living as Noble Savages who are not corrupted by society. This is the great quest of what in recent years was called liberalism and is now called progressivism.
Finally, you note that the film’s use of marriage as a theme “makes it seem like [the filmmakers] are trying to tell us something.”
You’re right. They are.