Review: Away We Go (2009)

What good is a baby? It slobbers, cries just when you’re about to fall asleep, ruins your sex life, and feels compelled to leave little brown presents behind, wherever it goes. Feel like running away? Me too. Three months away from the birth of their daughter, insurance salesman Burt (John Krasinski) and his girlfriend Verona (Maya Rudolph) run, too. They like to think they’re running to something—better home, better friends, better weather—but in reality, theirs is a road trip, as the title suggests, away from their 34 (33, according to Burt)-year-old lives and all their frivolities, for children cannot raise a child. Having a baby means they have to grow up, right? Apparently not.

I give you Burt and Verona’s travel itinerary: Start in Phoenix, with Lily (Allison Janney), Verona’s former coworker and a woman obsessed with two things: how great a rack she once had, and how boring her life is. Notice I mention nothing of her kids. Next stop Tucson, to see Verona’s sister Grace (Carmen Ejogo). In her few minutes of screentime, Ejogo perfectly captures the tragedy of a woman successful in public, but lonely and vulnerable in private. Our heroes next find themselves in Madison, WI, to see Burt’s kind-of-cousin LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who probably spent more time making her abbreviated name and studying nonsensical “Continuum” parenting philosophy than caring for her kids. I give you examples A, B, and C of how not to be a parent.

What Away We Go is a great example of, is storytelling. Burt and Verona, thanks to Krasinski and Rudolph’s fantastically realistic, heartfelt and nuanced performances, are people we care about. And the personalities they meet along their journey are just as compelling. Director Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road, Jarhead) has been accused of bringing a cold theatricality to his films. This film obliterates that misconception. Working from an Oscar-caliber script by Dave Eggers & Vendela Vida, Mendes paints a beautiful picture of North America and the colorful personalities that inhabit, in a film full of heart. I doubt you’ll love any characters this year as much as you do Burt and Verona. They’re the couple we wish we could be a part of: Always in love, always laughing, always honest. They cruise through their lives at a leisurely, never boring pace, learning valuable parenting lessons not through melodrama, but in small, meaningful doses. You might call them baby steps.

In a box-office dominated by Vegas hangovers, Away We Go is a welcome breath of fresh air, and the treatise on 21st-century parenting that Juno wishes it could be (honest to blog!). The highs and lows—miscarriages, divorce—of child rearing are paid equal attention. This is as realistic a portrayal of pregnancy as I recall seeing. It is also the first pregnancy film where we don’t see the child delivered; where the focus isn’t on growing baby bumps or grotesque vaginal inserts (I’m looking at you, Knocked Up), but on the parents. And what great parents Burt and Verona will be, not because they take Lily’s advice and ignore their child’s well-being or listen to LN and banish strollers from their household, but because they discover what parenting really is: What you make it. Love the child, and worry about the rest later.

In this world of divorces and adultery, Burt and Verona are unique. They don’t care how their child looks, or what she eats. They care only that she is their child, and that she is happy. Knowing they have a kid around the corner actually brings them closer. I guess that’s one thing a baby’s good for. Once you get past the slobbering.

Clarence Hammond
© Cinephile Magazine, 2009