Away We Go

'Away We Go' journeys from serious to smug

June 12, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

(Page 3 of 3)

Of course, going bananas would not have been the only way to play this material. Verona and Burt's trip to Montreal turns up Melanie Lynskey and Chris Messina, two underappreciated actors, as a pair of old college friends who've adopted a multiracial gaggle of happy kids. The parents have suffered tragedy, and Lynskey dramatizes sadness and dysfunction with quiet, moving physicality. That character's whole life is there in her long face and drooping limbs. It's the best performance in the movie.

Mendes does almost everything right with "Away We Go," which is a relief after watching him do almost everything wrong with "Revolutionary Road," where willful, museum-ready staging suffocated even the marital clichés. This new movie is looser and less oppressively styled than anything Mendes has tried before. He likes all the feral female energy.

The movie is like one of David O. Russell's manic, ranging comedies ("Flirting With Disaster," "I Heart Huckabees"), but it doesn't have enough of Russell's keen screwball surprise or human generosity. Mendes can't entirely surmount the smugness that pollutes Eggers and Vida's picaresque script, either. (It's the same smugness that chokes their books.) This is how you raise a family, the movie finally says, while remaining blind to not-insignificant matters of upbringing, class, and community. "Away We Go" doesn't celebrate life. Weirdly, it champions leaving life behind. Away, indeed.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.

READER COMMENTS »

View reader comments » Comment on this story »