It’s been so long that I can’t remember where I first read it anymore, but there’s an old parable about a village wise man who meets with three couples, each looking for a place to settle down and wondering if this particular town is the right fit. Each couple asks him the same question: “What are the people in this village like?” He responds to each by asking, “How were people where you lived before?”

No matter what the couples tell the wise man, he responds by saying, “You’ll find that people here are basically the same” — the moral of the story being that your experiences with the people around you are, at some level, basically a reflection of who you are. It’s overly simplistic, maybe, but it’s also very true — and my mind kept returning to it during Away We Go.

Director Sam Mendes’ previous meditations on domesticity have run from the violently acerbic (American Beauty) to the unremittingly bleak (Revolutionary Road), so it came as something of a surprise when he emerged with this relatively sunny portrait of a young couple (played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) trying to find a place to settle down before their baby’s impending birth. With a screenplay written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and a brilliant supporting cast that includes Catherine O’Hara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, and Jim Gaffigan, Away looked — on paper, anyway — like a perfectly low-key, drily humorous U-turn for a director who seemed to have become more interested in edification than entertainment.

Alas and alack — with Away We Go, Mendes forsook heavy-handed messages for a movie that isn’t really quite sure what it wants to say. (more…)