World's Greatest Parents

[June 10th, 2009]

On Jan. 22 of this year, in an all-caps blog burst of audacious self-pity, Kanye West accidentally defined a cultural epoch. “WHY,” he asked, “WON’T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!!!” By “you” he meant everything and everyone in the universe not named Kanye West. Notice the lack of a question mark: This was not a late-night philosophical plaint, but a bug-eyed demand. Later in the post, he dropped the interrogative niceties altogether, but held onto the trio of exclamation points: “LET ME BE GREAT!!!” I could fill a medium-sized Northwestern metropolis with people born after 1970 who’d buy a shirt—or make and market one—emblazoned with Mr. West’s plea. They’d don it ironically, but they’d mean it where it counts, down in that place where we all just know there is a perfect version of our lives that we fucking deserve as a reward for even existing at all. “Life is good” just isn’t good enough anymore.

With Away We Go, based on a screenplay by über-couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Sam Mendes (American Beauty) has made a slight comedy about the 21st-century version of entitled solipsism and whiny self-involvement that, in four syllables, West reduced to its essence. The problem is that Mendes, like Kanye before him, appears not to know this. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph star as Burt and Verona, a couple so solid, so damn smitten, that they manage to maintain eye contact and keep down their lunch while dropping sun and sky metaphors on each other. (They’re lucky they don’t have to hear the cloying soundtrack by Alexi Murdoch, whose sappy Nick Drake lifts might sicken even these lovebirds.) They are the perfect couple: sincere, sharing and impervious to shame. Verona isn’t even miffed when Burt interrupts a session of oral sex to let her know that she “tastes different.” With decent jobs and a nearly frictionless commitment to the long haul, they appear to want for little. Even a power outage is just another excuse to cuddle.

But for Burt and Verona (and me and you and everyone we know), to have most everything a human could wish for is to have just enough to know that there is still more to be had. When that earthy note in Verona’s vagina turns out to be the taste of baby, the couple turns to Burt’s parents, Jerry and Gloria—played by my idea of a perfect couple, Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara—for help shouldering the newborn load. Jerry and Gloria, however, already have plans to spend their next few golden years overseas. Down two free babysitters, Burt and Verona decide to take a road trip. They’ll visit friends and family across North America, in the hopes of finding the perfect place to raise their child.

The rest of Away We Go proceeds in typical road trip fashion: Burt and Verona have a series of close encounters of the absurd kind, until they realize what they’re looking for was actually close to home all along. The first stop on their itinerary is also the film’s high point, as sappy dialogues and indomitable adoration are set aside so Allison Janney can hog the spotlight for 10 delightful minutes. Her Lily is the first of a series of caricatures intended to demonstrate the intolerable vapidity of existence outside of Burt and Verona’s bubble of love, but beneath the uncouth raunch and callous disregard for her children, Lily is pained. Mendes sees into this character, and he lets Janney coax truth from a rather lazily scripted sitcom-grade personality.

If only Mendes had brought this emotional insight to bear on Burt and Verona. I don’t expect fictional characters to be likable, but I expect filmmakers to know when they are not. The magical couple are met at every turn by well meaning if sometimes kooky and fucked-up people who want to help, only to be shamed by the snide superiority of Mr. and Mrs. Right. There is potential here for a humorous study of the emotional alienation of obsessive lovers. But that would require some understanding, at some level of this dense and tired film, of what these people actually are. And what are they? Intolerant and insufferable brats. But you know what? We should just let them be great. On an island, perhaps.