Away We Go

Dave Eggers is just precious, isn’t he? He’s got his quirky memoir, his quirky novels, his quirky monthly magazine, his quirky literary quarterly, and now...his quirky movie. With his wife, the novelist Vendela Vida, Eggers penned this picture about Burt and Verona, two thirtysomethings who are - quite literally, and cue Michael W. Smith - trying to find their place in this world. Now, as you may have noticed above, Dave Eggers is a literary fellow; he edits a magazine (The Believer) and a quarterly literary journal (McSweeney’s) and has written several novels to go along with his best-known work, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Modest, eh?

Also overrated. Not bad, you understand, just not nearly as good as it was made out to be; and the same thing can be said about Away We Go. Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) discover that they are pregnant when Burt notices, while performing oral sex on her in the opening scene, that Verona tastes different. Interrupting the act to expound upon this, Burt tells us that he has read that that sort of change is indicative of menopause or pregnancy. Subtlety, it would seem, is entirely foreign to Mr. Eggers.

They embark on a road trip to find the right place to bring up their daughter-to-be, and the odd thing about the way that this story is constructed - coming, as it does, from two authors - is that it smacks of hackery. They moved to Connecticut to be near Burt’s parents for the arrival of the baby, but then find that Burt’s parents are moving to, um...Belgium. And that’s a little wacky. Then Burt’s parents tell Burt and Verona that they can have the house while they are away, as long as their realtor doesn’t find a renter before they leave. In the middle of the dinner they are having when Burt’s parents explain all this, the realtor calls and tells Burt’s parents that they have a renter. And that’s a little wackier. It’s also over the top to the point of being annoying, which neatly sums up my opinion of the humor of Dave Eggers.

I laughed during this movie - the first time he trotted out each joke - but it wasn’t long after he kept each vignette burning by fanning the flames of the same joke with which he started each vignette that I started to feel annoyed. In one scene, Burt and Verona worry to each other that they are fuckups; but as they try to comfort each other in what ought to be a reasonably tender moment, Eggers makes it awkward (and only very slightly funny) by having them repeat the word fuckup over and over again. It’s funny once - maybe twice; but Eggers flogs it (and every other joke in the movie) like he just discovered how to jerk off and doesn’t ever want to come out of the bathroom.

The road trip consists of vignettes that are entirely compartmentalized - complete with big title cards before each one begins, in case you’re having trouble following along - and that each contain Burt and Verona visiting a friend or family member; and everyone they visit is an outsized stereotype, from the quirky nuclear family in Phoenix to the quirky hippies in Madison to the quirky expats in Montreal. And would you believe that when we get to the end, the answer they were looking for was right there under their noses the whole time?

Hackery! Hackery, I tell you! Either that, or Dave Eggers has always been little more than a slightly more sophisticated Judd Apatow and I just never knew it. Of course, I suppose it could be the missus; I don’t know. I haven’t read anything that Vida has written. I have read the Eggers memoir, though, and this movie smacks of the same self-importance as that book.

Which is not to say that the film is entirely without some positives. Those jokes that get repeated over and over again are genuinely funny the first one or two times around, and the music by Alexi Murdoch is pretty good, too. You may remember him from his song on the Garden State soundtrack, which is one of the all-time great motion picture soundtracks not composed by John Williams for George Lucas. Also, Maya Rudolph is excellent - though it’s probably no accident that her character (who lost both her parents at a young age, as Eggers did in real life) is given more emotional depth; and she pulls it off pretty well, with surprising restraint for an SNL alumna. She should not be surprised if she gets a phone call early in the morning on the day the Golden Globe nominations are announced.

Overall, though, I was disappointed, and what I found most disappointing was the writing. Apart from the obvious structural flaws, I got the feeling that Eggers and Vida were extremely hesitant to dig too deep into the serious issues at work in the story without having something vulgar ready to go the moment they sensed the need for a bit of levity. I don’t know that I have ever seen a movie that used the word vagina so many times. Dave Eggers is, if not the most important, certainly the most prominent of the current crop of established contemporary American writers of literature, and his literary reputation obviously precedes him here; but the crude humor subverts the story and renders the characters largely ineffectual. To the extent that this film is not a colossal failure, Maya Rudolph deserves the lion’s share of the credit.