I’ve been a fan to some degree of all of the films from director Sam Mendes, but if there’s one film that nobody seems to bring up much from this classy and stylish filmmaker, it’s his underrated and extremely perceptive road movie Away We Go, which got a quiet release in the summer of 2009, and garnered very mixed reviews, with some people loving it and some really hating it. This is a film that holds up a mirror to a variety of American subcultures and essentially shows the viewer how messed up everyone is, and how we’re all just struggling to find our little nugget of gold, while we make countless bad decisions along the way and meet people who constantly fail and disappoint us. Feeling very much like a movie from the 70’s, this was Mendes’ most aesthetically loose piece of filmmaking, eschewing his formally precise compositions in favor of spontaneous hand-held cinematography, which complimented the episodic and freewheeling screenplay by husband and wife team Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph were perfectly cast as a mid-30’s couple on the brink of being parents who set out on the road to visit friends and family in a last ditch effort to plant roots before their baby arrives. A terrific supporting cast including Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey(!), Josh Charles, Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara are along for the ride, all getting a chance to create lasting and distinct portraits of diseased Americana which are sadly too believable, while Krasinski and Rudolph smartly underplay every scene, allowing the story to come to their characters without any forcing or over emoting. They also conveyed terrific sense of romantic chemistry between one another, which upped the empathy quotient in an otherwise biting piece of social satire. The upfront and awkwardly humorous sex scene that more or less opens the movie sets the quirky tone right away, and I loved how this felt like a total 180 from anything that Mendes had done before or has done since. This was his Flirting With Disaster (another wildly underappreciated gem from a distinct cinematic voice, David O. Russell), and it’s a film that more people should make the time for.
Podcasting Them Softly 