On and On 6 comments

By A.G. Harmon

In Sam Mendes’ Away We Go, Burt Farlander (John Krasinski) begins his preparations for impending fatherhood with self-improvement classes. Representative instruction involves “family defense” and “knot-tying,” courses that could as easily win him a merit badge as ready him for a child.

He also practices at being a cobbler, though his concept of that trade seems rather confused with whittling. His girlfriend, Verona (Maya Rudolph), several months from delivery, corrects him. But Verona sympathizes with Burt’s faltering attempts to prepare himself to be grown, a state that entails responsibility, capability, and perhaps most of all, stability. The couple doubts their qualifications regarding the first two aspects of this definition, but they’re convicted in their fears about the last.

Living in a cramped, pre-fabricated home, the kind that’s brought in on the back of a trailer and set down in the middle of a repellant landscape, the two have set up housekeeping here so as to be near Burt’s parents. But to the couple’s shock and surprise, the old folks have decided to move to Belgium. This, they say, will “fulfill a lifelong dream” (the stock excuse of someone who’s about to screw you good). With childish glee, they’ve rented their own spacious house to strangers, and are free as a bird to go where they will.

Burt and Verona just stare.

Adult immaturity becomes a sub-text of the film as the couple embarks on a cross-country trek to find a home. For the two are mere children themselves, of a kind only somewhat more self-aware than Burt’s parents. They dress like war-time refugees about to make a mountain crossing, and are always uncomfortable in their surroundings.

Burt, who manages insurance speculators, does all his business over the phone. That way, he can adopt an “older man” voice to give his client’s confidence in someone they would surely doubt if they met in person. Verona, having lost her parents when she was in college, refuses to marry because her parents won’t be around to see the wedding.

And the people they encounter in their quest are a freak parade of bad deportment. In Arizona, Verona’s old boss is a vulgar fool who claims that her behavior doesn’t really matter. Her children are predetermined anyway, she says, so she can act in outlandishly inappropriate ways without consequence. This mystifies the couple, and they travel on.

In Madison, Wisconsin, they meet up with Burt’s “cousin,” a woman who isn’t really his cousin at all. She and her husband are New Age idiots who breastfeed four year-olds, are opposed to strollers, and condescend in the staggering way that only liberal academics can.

All of this is done with fine humor, but as the couple travels on and on, the question becomes increasingly serious: How do you become an adult when nobody else is?

There are false moments, manufactured things we’re supposed to bless or find sympathetic; some relationships come with stickers (“She gets along with her”; “They’re a happy but troubled family”).

But though the ending is rather cheap, it’s a nice movie all in all; as far as it goes. Because I think a larger point is left unmade. Yes, the quest, the search, is part of life. But Lord knows, that’s all we do now. If anything, the foil to our hoped for “settledness” is our supreme mobility, our capacity to pick up and move at the drop of a hat—if not breaking up housekeeping, then relationships.

It’s worth pondering what so much independence does to the old concept of “community”—the sense of a home. If I don’t like this job, or these people I see every day—if I don’t like the gist of the priest’s homily or the cut of the neighbors’ jib—if you’ve held your mouth the wrong way for me to tolerate you as a friend anymore—I can move. I can easily drop you/it and find someone/place else.

There’s something that pulls against stability when nothing’s of necessity.

In the past, people weren’t so mobile. They had to stay put. They had to find a way to live where they were, to get along with who they had—imperfect and messy as it may have been—because getting something better, or even the ability to get away at all—was hard to come by.

Need is a dimension of a real community, it seems. I must have what only you can supply. Maybe that’s forever gone; maybe having to stay is impossible now, and the gratification of immediate avoidance is the norm. Perhaps that’s a good thing, in some cases; at times, there’s no other way.

And yet again, it’s worrisome. I wonder if we can bear all these leavings.