The Odyssey Couple

“Burt, do you have a doula?”

“Oh yes — it’s delicious!”

“No, not a dolma —a doula!”

That snippet of dinner-table dialogue is from Away We Go, but take away the au courant bohemian cultural references and you’ve got a setup and a punchline straight out of the most wide-lapelled ’70s sitcom imaginable. Strip away Ellen Kuras’ evocative cinematography and the deliberately shabby production and costume design, and Away We Go’s premise turns out to be pretty formulaic as well: when their in-laws abruptly announce they’re moving to Europe, expectant couple Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) realizes that they have nothing keeping them in their current home and so they take a trip around the U.S. (with a quick detour to Montreal) to sort of audition various cities. And in each city, they reconnect with a different set of friends or family members. Basically, the film is Four Christmases, but director Sam Mendes stages everything as if he were making Carnal Knowledge.

Many of the people Burt and Verona meet on their trip are unapologetic caricatures, especially Allison Janney as a Phoenix mother whose inability to censor herself gets worse, not better, when her kids are within earshot; and Maggie Gyllenhaal as an obnoxious New Age university professor so committed to “continuum parenting” that she won’t even allow strollers in her house and is shocked to learn that Burt and Verona are planning on keeping their child in another room when they have sex.

These scenes could be the building blocks for a light, amusing social comedy for the Utne Reader set, but it’s not enough for Mendes and screenwriters Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida to “merely” make a comedy; they want Away We Go to be something deeper, and so there’s a bunch of mopey Nick Drake soundalike songs by Alexi Murdoch that keep popping up on the soundtrack, and they throw in a stunningly awful scene where an old college buddy of Burt’s tells him about his wife Munch’s five miscarriages while they watch her onstage doing a chaste poledance during “amateur night” at a strip club — all to the accompaniment of The Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’.”

I think I made a fundamental break with Away We Go during that ghastly sequence, and the film never came close to winning me back. (“Oh! Sweet Nuthin’”? “Munch”? Aaaaarrrrrggghh!) Every little thing about it started to bug me: John Krasinski’s ugly beard, his ugly glasses, even the decision to name his character “Burt.” Why is he wearing those glasses anyway? It’s never made clear just how poorly off Burt and Verona are — in the opening scenes, they barely seem to be getting by, living in an unheated hovel with a cardboard window and a bedroom one corner of which Burt apparently has converted into a wood shop. But then they go off on this capricious but fairly expensive-looking trip, crisscrossing the country from Colorado to Arizona to Wisconsin to Montreal to Miami, taking flights and sleeping in hotels, apparently without worrying about any of the costs. It begins to look like Burt could easily afford better glasses and nicer suits and shoes, but chooses to wear wallabies, camelhair jackets, and that ugly pair of specs that make his eyes look 50 per cent larger than normal.

Away We Go is more loosely plotted than most comedies of this type, and the settings are scruffier as well. That’s refreshing to see, but all the important moments feel phony as can be — we’re talking Garden State phony here, folks, like in the scene where Burt and Verona lie on a backyard trampoline and take turns making warm-and-funny promises about how they’ll raise their daughter. Sadly, promising to shave was not among them.