As soon as I saw the trailer for Away We Go, I anticipated the backlash. The sketches, quirky music, pregnant lady, and lovable male lead sort of inextricably link the film to Juno, which, while not a bad movie at all, was iconic enough that no film with similarities will be able to escape the comparison.
Away We Go – penned by literary powerhouse couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida as they awaited the birth of their first child – is more like Juno‘s grown-up older cousin. Its protagonists aren’t in high school – they’re in their early thirties. They aren’t in a kind of awkward puppy love stage – they’ve been committed to one another for ten years, obviously in love but not singing songs about it. Their childhood friends are spread out across the country instead of in their high school, and they’re dealing with big grown-up issues: divorce, lost youth, infertility, complexes real and imagined, health.
While Juno is infinitely wordly-wise and knows in, Burt (a bearded John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are pretty sure they’re immature. “Are we fuck-ups?” they ask each other early on. They aren’t, but they sure can look like it, depending on who’s doing the looking.
I try never to read a review of a film until after I’ve written about it, but I’d only begun writing my thoughts on this film when, against my better judgment, I clicked through to A.O. Scott’s review of the film. Let me assure the reader that I have a lot of respect for Mr. Scott. I see him around sometimes at screenings and always feel slightly slightly star struck: he’s one of the few reviewers I read regularly, because I think he usually has an intelligent perspective on the movies, devoid of hyperbole and tinged with the obvious fact that he likes movies. When I grow up I want to write like him.
However, on Away We Go, I think he’s dead wrong – but I don’t really think it’s his fault.
Warning: there may be some slight spoilers down here.
Mr. Scott characterizes the film as a “flight from adulthood” disguised as a search for that very thing, a sort of romp wherein Burt and Verona, holier-than-thou characters with a perfect relationship who are unfailingly humble and unmockable, alternately affectionately mock and pity the people they visit on their search for a good place to raise their child.
I had to wonder if we’d watched the same film. Burt and Verona are far from unmockable. They – and we – are pretty damn aware of their faults. Verona really hates the way Burt talks to his clients; Verona is unwilling to confront the reality of her parents’ death, years ago; Burt wants desperately to marry Verona, is marvelously awkward, and petrified that he’s going to screw things up.
But they do love each other, sincerely, and support one another unconditionally. They’re not even the only couple in the film who present a view of committed relationships that is radically supportive and loving. And I wonder if that’s where the true trouble lies.
When did it become a flaw for on-screen characters to have virtues, to not practice a self-reflexive ironic stance toward themselves, to be sincere, to take their lives seriously (but not themselves), to be in love past the giddy stage? What kind of a world do we live in where the film’s characters, which feel lifted directly from my own experience – the loud suburban mom who mourns her lost chances and taunts her children and husband, the irritatingly sanctimonious parents who insist that their children not sit in strollers, the couple with deep hurt who still try to pull together – simply serve as foils for Burt and Verona’s contempt-flavored pity?
I connected with the film at a deep level, simply because it portrayed a lot of very strange (and not-so-strange) people who, despite their flaws and obnoxiousness, their problems, their ridiculousness or just sadness, had someone by their side. Because I’m like that too. Anyone who’s been in a relationship for a long time knows that their partner knows things about their personality that no one else will ever know. It’s a continuing miracle that anyone stays together – and that’s what this film shows.
In one of my favorite scenes from the movie, Burt and Verona sit with their married friends from college in a Montreal restaurant, talking what it takes to make a family. The discussion devolves into an admittedly ridiculous demonstration with pancakes and sugar cubes – and syrup, which is the love that makes everything stick together.
But it’s the truth. Marriages and families fall apart every single day, before our eyes, and many times because one – or all – of the members no longer want to be stuck together, whether with syrup or love. Syrup is sticky and messy. Love isn’t neat. And as one of them says, “It makes you be a better person than you ever thought you could be.”
Later in his review, Mr. Scott characterizes director Sam Mendes’s earlier efforts American Beauty and Revolutionary Road as sloshing around “vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs,” whereas this film is about “an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.” American Beauty aside – which is probably the last film that really ever could criticize the suburbs, with the possible exception of the astounding Little Children – I’m pretty sure Mr. Scott has just missed the point. Revolutionary Road was not about the suburbs. In fact, the ending of the film contains a poignant scene in which we see that the main characters could have been happy – that a marriage which sticks together through infidelity and heartbreak is not about location, but about how we react to what happens. Revolutionary Road is not about the suburbs; it’s about a couple who fall in love with the idea of one another, but not the reality of what it takes to build a life.
(As a side note, Sam Mendes mentioned after the screening that he interrupted post-production on Revolutionary Road to shoot Away We Go and only realized as he started working on the film that they are companion pieces. And they are. Frank and April desire freedom, but can’t seem to reach it; whereas Burt and Verona have freedom, and desire rootedness.)
In the same way, Away We Go is not about “the open road” or “the pioneer spirit.” Instead, it captures the rootlessness that my generation finds itself in. We’ve largely grown up without intact families, whether because of parents’ selfishness or tragedy. Our world is no longer rooted in tradition and place, which means we really can pick up and move at a moment’s notice and, fairly quickly, reconstruct a life. Friends come and go, and if we leave town, there’s always Facebook. We can ditch our family history pretty fast.
Which is why Burt and Verona’s final choice is so significant – a choice for which Mr. Scott has little respect: “But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy. Not an unattractive or uncommon one, it must be said, and for that reason it is tempting to follow Burt and Verona into the precious, hermetic paradise that awaits them at the end of the road.”
I don’t presume to know if Mr. Scott has experienced losing a parent as a young person or not. But I was about Verona’s age when my father died – days before my wedding – and I can testify that the ultimate place that they choose to live is not away from pain, but right smack in the middle of what is most difficult – what most colors Verona’s view of the world. To choose to not pull away from the pain in your past, but to finally embrace it and make it part of your own history and future, is brave, adult behavior, something few of us have done and even fewer have seen done onscreen.
What is beautiful about Burt and Verona’s relationship is that it’s one to which we can aspire. They’re not corny people, and they’re not perfect, either. It seems like there’s a lot of things in their lives that they’d like to clean up. But they’re trying. They want to support one another and raise their baby in an environment in which it will feel nurtured and supported, but not stifled. They’re a couple whose fights are discussions, who have to manufacture a reason to yell at one another. They are, above all, sincere about trying to live life the best way they can manage.
And honestly? I think my generation is tired of self-reflexive irony. I think we get that committed relationships, marriages, parenthood – they’re tough work. And we rarely get a good model of what that looks like. We barely know what it means to see two people committed to one another and to what it will take to fight it out for life, side by side. We need models like Burt and Verona and their Montreal friends to assure us that it’s possible.
I know this sound ridiculous coming from someone who’s barely been married three years, but I am realizing that this is actually possible – not just from my own experience, but from being allowed into the lives and homes of older friends with these relationships. It’s not required that marriages and relationships go sour after children, or simply after many years. You can dislike something about someone, let them know it, and still love the person. It’s possible to retain your individuality while constructing an identity as part of a pair. And you don’t have to be bitter about it.
That, I think, is a revolutionary idea, and one that we millenials desperately need to know is true. Call me naive. In my generation, that’s actually kind of okay.
All I can surmise is that Away We Go may not be the kind of movie that people who want to their protagonists to be mockable will hate. If you can’t view the world or yourself without ironic glasses, then run far away from this movie.
But if you’re tired of watching people destroy one another onscreen – if you want to believe that it can be possible to be committed to another person for a lifetime and still be happy, interesting people – then you’re going to like Away We Go. And Mr. Scott: it will like you.
—-
You can listen to the audio discussion with Sam Mendes and John Krasinski from the screening I was at at the Moving Image Source website.