Ironic quirkiness smothers endlessly muddled film

By Mal Vincent

The Virginian-Pilot

The couple in "Away We Go" were apparently born a bit too late for their style or, for that matter, for the style of the movie they inhabit. They are would-be Bohemians who seem to harbor some illusion that there are still flower children in the world and that they can wander about and "find themselves."

We, as this endless muddle drones on, are more concerned with finding a movie.

Is it a comedy? Yes there are several laughs. A few are big ones, but there's more soul-searching than gag-hunting.

He, the guy, played by the talented but never-quite-breaking-through John Krasinski is 33. He has a job with insurance, but he clearly regards it as no more than an imposition that gets in the way of his real life. She, played by Maya Rudolph, is pregnant. They are not married, but they look forward to becoming parents, even though they wander around and wonder if they have messed up their lives. I know I should care, but I don't.

This movie, playing at Norfolk's Naro Expanded Cinema, is so full of ironic quirkiness that it smothers itself. This rootless couple goes on the road to find the right place to raise the child. They go from Phoenix to Miami to Montreal - meeting silly or outright crazy relatives, friends and others along the way. Do I care yet? I'm trying.

They apparently haven't heard that the economy is falling apart and that, someday soon, we might even have to live in a world where people are required to actually pay for the things they buy.

His parents (Jeff Daniels and the always mischievous and usually hilarious Catherine O'Hara) are going to run off to Paris, unconcerned about the impending grandchild. (We're supposed to see them as selfish, one supposes, but, after all, it's not their child, is it? This couple seems to want a free ride and, for the duration of this movie they get it).

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a kook who has an obsessive dislike for strollers. (They "push the child away.") This is a quirk worth 30 seconds, if at all, but the script tries to turn it into an entire sketch.

Rudolph is wonderfully non-Hollywoodish and natural as the pregnant member of "the couple," but she is asked to do little except react to the parade of kooks trotted before her.

Sam Mendes, a fine theater as well as film director, did this trifle in the middle of a production shutdown on his more important film "Revolutionary Road" (which was so threatening to married couples that they stayed away from it with gusto). Mendes, who won the Oscar for the sardonic "American Beauty," is adept at rubbing us the wrong way and making us pay for it, but even he needs better material than this.

This couple are indicative of "creative types" who have never really created anything but can put on quite a show to convince themselves that they are really smarter than the world allows them to be. We're not so sure. First of all, they would be well advised to find a center for their lives, and their movie.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com