• What’s Good: …crickets.
• What’s Not: The film is condescending and full of toxic smugness. The lack of character consistency makes the comedy not funny and drama not convincing. This is an all-around horrible experience full of bad melodrama, annoying musical interludes and hit or miss, or really miss comedic moments. What stings the most is that the script is by David Eggers who wrote a brilliant “Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”
• Faux Peter Traverse Quote: Up, up and away we go to the best movie of the year! If this golden gem will make your heart sing and loins crackle you’re a soulless McCain supporter.

From the endless navel gazings of “American Beauty” to the constant “I’m better than this!” whining of “Revolutionary Road’s” young lovers, British director Sam Mendes makes films about annoying people with monstrous senses of entitlement that also feel they’re way more profound than they are. Mendes slops it on until you too want to commit suicide or at least help his characters along the way with their self induced/publicly inflicted misery. His new film is all that with the added stylistic device that it is indie film grandiose instead of overly cinematogrophized (my word) grandiose–I would give this artfully dreadful dramedy a big fat F worthy of the equally self absorbed “Rachael Getting Married” if it were not a competent piece if filmmaking. And by competent I mean it’s shot in focus. What is not competent is everything else I saw.

“Away We Go” gets a lot of use out of its not-so-clever title. A LOT. The film is about a funny/sad couple who scour North America looking for a place to live. The reason: Because the girl Maya Rudolph is pregnant and her boyfriend, played by the overrated phenomenon that is John Kransinski, has no job. So….. FOLKY MUSIC/ROAD TRIP TIME!!! because poor 33-year-olds can totally afford to jet across the continent and back. This is the kind of empty and meandering planes/trains/automobiles odyssey that has no reason to exist other than to show you how unique its characters are and how strange everyone else in the world is. It’s about alienation in that respect but about about self-promotion in all others in the sense that wherever they go and whatever they see it’s ALWAYS about them. In a post “Garden State” (curse you Zach Braff!) cinematic world, the film’s only addition to this newly popular (and yet to be bearable) thirty-something approved genre is that it’s a co-existential drama/comedy. That equates to double the smug and double the misery.

That’s a big problem. As one road trip rendezvous bleeds into another the film’s humor works at times but I kept having to ask myself what purpose it served. When the two leach, I mean leads meet an Arizona couple who shout out random threats and vulgarities like “my tits are down to my knees… and they have hair on them!” (contrary to that line, Allison Janney’s F-word blasting mom is best thing about this film), it’s meant to be funny. When they meet a Canadian couple who have adopted four kids and force them to watch only the happy parts of “The Sound of Music” because can’t have any on their own, it’s sad. The  new-age hippie couple is funny (or, at least, the film thinks they are) whereas the brother whose wife just left him is sad. On and on. The film seems to be struggling to making a point about the fracturing of America (or something) but the narrative does not uphold that already thin theme in any consistent or believable way. It just twists it inward. The dialogue is also maddening in is bi-polarity. The non-leads that pop in and crash out are way too sitcom-y and the leads say random-ass things like “If I die, tell the baby that I went out fighting Russian soldiers to keep Chechnyan orphans safe” (“I’m paraphrasing but probably saying it better than the film would). As if afraid to really talk seriously the characters usually espouse such ”funny” lines in the middle of the billions of dead serious what-does-it-all-mean discussion that go nowhere and go nowhere often.

The film’s phony hipster musings are nauseating and it’s plot is noxious. There is nothing I like about this film. Think of a structurally similar film like “Broken Flowers” in which a man goes on a journey to meet past lovers and take away all the quirky charm and brilliance then add a cast of forced personalities and a non stop stream of eclectically hip tunes. The film’s plot is as mechanical as its emotional pallet. Intertitles say “Away to Arizona” followed by the couple going to Arizona, followed by the couple meeting that couple and getting creeped out by their CRAZZZZZZZIIIINEESSSSS followed by a nighttime conversation about the baby to be or childhood issues (waaaaaaah, my parents died when I was 22) or some other insufferable bore (the story about Maya Rudolph and her sister attaching fake plastic fruit to a failed lemon tree is so no metaphorical or poignant) followed by a line, the next day, like “Hey, lets go to ___ to visit my ___.” Repeat, rinse, and after the tenth nostalgic musical cue that more or less tells you exactly what to think or how to feel: puke.

Just about the only thing that is not mechanical are the main characters. They’re just haphazard. Their personalities conform to whatever kind of moment the film currently harping on. If it’s comedy than Krasinski  is doing wacky things like screaming “cunt!” in public to get the baby’s low heart rate up (uh, ha?) but when he’s hearing about his friend’s inability to have a kid while his wife is doing a fully clothed strip tease in a Canadian bar (what?!)  he’s all tender and weepy and acting like the Emo King of the World. Then there’s the in-between moments that are not funny or sad like when the uptight hippie couple forbids strollers from entering their sanctuary then say something racist that ticks off Krasinski’s character, causing him to run throughout the house with the crazy couple’s sheltered kid in a stroller as Rudolph is perched on the door and laughing like a madwoman. Wow, this film is awful!

Grade: D-