Journey’s end | 19 September 2009

Away We Go
15, Nationwide

Away We Go is a comic drama directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road) and it’s sweet, I suppose, but it’s also oddly inconsequential, fake and annoying. It’s a sort of road movie, following the journey of an expectant couple who travel the US in search of the perfect place to put down roots and raise a family. And what does this journey teach them? According to my press notes, they ‘realise they must define home on their own terms’, which has to be good. I mean, imagine if they hadn’t realised that, and had defined it on Gilbert & George’s terms, and what a scatological nightmare that would be. (They want to do the best for their child, and it will never even be able to have friends round!)

Written by the husband and wife team of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, it stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph as Burt and Verona, a couple in their thirties who are about to have this baby and appear not to realise that millions of people have had babies for millions of years — having a baby is thought to predate the iPod, the internet and even the George Foreman lean, mean grilling machine — and their best bet might be to just get on with it and muddle through as best they can, like the rest of us. Actually, that’s unkind. They love each other and are hopelessly in love with each other, which isn’t something you see often in the cinema, possibly because it is so dramatically and fatally dull. This is a film that yearns to be another Juno or a Little Miss Sunshine, but you can’t contrive quirky, off-beat pizzazz.