Hipster parent myth #1: Playing fleet foxes for your unborn child won’t guarantee a good beard

Even the least discerning and most pliant indie hipsters may have cringed at the poster for Away We Go. That cutesy, post-Juno graphic-design cocktail of photo, illustration and hand-drawn type was more than enough to indicate the movie’s target demographic even if star John Krasinski wasn’t pictured looking like a guy who sells merch at a Fleet Foxes show.

The only miscalculation on the part of the Focus Features marketing department is giving such prominence to the line: “From director Sam Mendes.” It’s hard to discern what Mendes’ imprimatur should connote. Ten years on, the Oscar triumph for American Beauty’s smug blend of toothless satire and pedophilic fantasy-mongering is as mystifying as ever. Over the course of his three features since — Road to Perdition, Jarhead and Revolutionary Road — the Brit theatre hotshot has cultivated the aura of Important Hollywood Director. Yet the films rarely feel anything but airless and artificial, their pretensions only occasionally punctured by the unrulier contributions of a supporting player (e.g., Paul Newman in Perdition, Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road). One suspects his greatest achievement in the eyes of punters and cineastes alike is impregnating Kate Winslet.

Now, if the marketers really wanted some cred with the cool kids, they should’ve increased the type size for Dave Eggers’ name. For it is he of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and McSweeney’s fame who wrote Away We Go in collaboration with wife Vendela Vida, herself the author of three books and co-editor of The Believer. Though it was her pregnancies for the couple’s two kids that first inspired Vida to start the script, the film’s overall tone is most strongly reminiscent of Eggers’ bestselling memoir. There’s the same amiable and quotable blend of sarcasm and sincerity, the same noble attempt to cut through the protective layers of irony which encase the average young adult of today and get to somewhere real and true, y’know?

And despite some flaws in both the plan and the execution, Away We Go largely fulfills that ambition. It also generates a lot of goodwill thanks to the performances of Krasinski and Maya Rudolph — the former SNL player gets the part she’s long deserved after small but strong showings in A Prairie Home Companion and Idiocracy.

They play Burt and Verona, an unmarried-but-long-together couple whose feelings of rootlessness and anxieties about family are exacerbated by the impending arrival of their first child. After discovering that Burt’s parents (played by Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels, the first proof of Mendes’ continued flair for casting) are about to leave them in the lurch by moving to Antwerp, Burt and Verona decide to hit the road themselves.

Though they’re ostensibly searching for a place to call home, what they’re really doing is surveying various models of the contemporary family unit in hopes of finding one that suits them. Naturally, the most monstrous moms are the most fun. In Phoenix, they meet up with Verona’s hilariously crude ex-boss Lily, played with maximum sass by Juno’s own Allison Janney. Her inadequacy as a role model is indicated thusly: she badmouths her kids when they’re in earshot, describes her sucked-dry boobs as “hairy nut sacks” and clearly wouldn’t mind swapping away her hubby Lowell (comedian Jim Gaffigan).

In Wisconsin, they find Burt’s family friend LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an equally broad caricature of an over-privileged bourgeois academic whose every utterance is coloured by her new-age-y brand of sanctimony. When Burt and Verona wonder if it’s wise for her family to still sleep in the same bed, LN asks, “Are you planning on hiding your lovemaking from your kids?” The increasingly aggrieved Burt’s revenge on her is the movie’s comedic highpoint.

Away We Go shifts into a more serious and contemplative mode during later encounters with college friends in Montreal (where the couple is thrilled to discover that they put cheese and gravy on french fries) and Paul Schneider as Burt’s brother in Miami. While the quieter scenes do reveal the heart of the matter (especially during the duo’s touching conversation while lying on a trampoline), Away We Go struggles to find a satisfactory substitute for the pointed humour and raucous energy that distinguishes the first half. And like many movies with obviously episodic structures (the chapter intertitles that announce the changes in locale are a wholly unnecessary touch), it’s marred by an ending that feels tacked on — the resolution is too firm for characters that pride themselves on their own indeterminacy.

Mendes milks it for all the gravity he can, emphasizing the bigness of this final big moment with another overbearing piece of man-gina music by Alexi Murdoch. (The British singer’s songs litter Away We Go’s soundtrack like so many mouldy peaches.) Otherwise, the director largely resists his tendency to fussy up the frame, a surprise given this road movie’s ample opportunities for him to indulge his fetish for American landscapes. What’s more, he respects the rich and subtle interplay of Krasinski and Rudolph as they play a rare sort of couple in contemporary American movies, one in which the partners treat each other with genuine love and kindness.

So maybe Mendes has a future in mumblecore after all. Besides, he’s not the only Hollywood hotshot whose movies need more of the sympathy and affection that Eggers and Vida display toward their characters. I can’t wait for them to write something for Michael Bay.