moviereview colin fraser film movie australia review critic flicks away we go
Mr American Beauty takes a road trip with this delightfully crafted ode to simple, garden variety love. In an opening that includes a discussion about vaginal flavours, we learn 30-somethings Burt and Verona are going to have a child. When they learn that Burt's gloriously selfish parents are leaving for Belgium a month before the baby is due, these neo-orphans decide they can move as well. But where? So begins a journey of discovery as they search out a new home for their new family. What they encounter is the stuff of comic horror, a freak show of near-friends and distant relatives dotted across the country. “No one is in love like us, right?” asks a nervous Verona.
Studded with guest turns – Catherine O'Hara, Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Allison Janney, Chris Messina – Mendes avoids the pitfall of creating a one-joke, one-for-the-gang by ensuring each has a meaty contribution. It is the women who win out as their characters get the juiciest roles and the biggest laughs (the hyperactive frustration of Janney's inappropriate family Mom is terrifying). Not that it is all quirky comedy. The desperate sadness of a childless mother is tenderly evoked in Melanie Lynskey's amateur pole dance. They are in turn balanced by the goofy charm of Krasinski's Burt and Rudolph's calmly centred Verona.
Clearly a small piece that sits well outside the expectation of Mendes' canon of ball-breakers like Road to Perdition, Jarhead or Revolutionary Road, Away We Go never feels like something he tossed off at the weekend. It is a considered piece that brings his English gaze on the American way in all its warmth and trepidation. There's no fashionable hysteria nor fashionably nauseating camera work - lensing by Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is quite beautiful. Mendes has created a sweetly tender film that completely captures the honest, laugh-out-loud simplicity of what it's like to be in love.
// COLIN FRASER
moviereview colin fraser film movie australia review critic flicks