Away We Go (2009)

Here’s the premise of Away We Go: An expecting, unmarried couple in their thirties wants to find a new place to live because the man’s parents are leaving town a month before the baby will be born to travel for two years and his parents are the only reason they're in that town. So, they travel to cities like Phoenix, Montreal, and Miami to find a place to raise their child. Oh yeah, and the pregnant women refuses to marry.

Currently, I’m reading The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (author Ron Hansen). Yesterday, noting a major similarity, I was ready to compare it to Away We Go.

Yesterday, I was ready to toss both into a garbage bin I call “Technically Astute, Narratively Arid.” That may be a fancy way of saying “This story is boring,” but I think it says a little more: It’s built well, but what is built isn’t very interesting.

My issue with Away We Go and (previously with) The Assassination of Jesse James is that these stories never get messy. I never get a sense of the story becoming increasingly complicated.

Away We Go is a road trip from heaven. The protagonists fly from one city to the next. They always have a free place to stay. The breadwinner works from his cell-phone; he has no office. His long time girlfriend is sixth months pregnant, though large as nine (a running joke of the movie). But nothing bad ever happens to this couple.

Likewise, there aren’t many twists and turns in the first two-hundred pages of The Assassination of Jesse James. The writing is excellent often. Occasionally, you cringe at a visceral description. The conversations are interesting. You get upset that Hansen turns a noun into a verb and then he hits you with a shocking slice of 19th century real life that makes it okay. But the situation never gets messy…until yesterday (about page 200 (of 300)).

The Assassination of Jesse James (finally) gets messy, gets complicated, makes you wonder what could possibly happen next. I never felt that way about Away We Go.

One way Hansen, despite his title giving the story away (a very clever decision, it seems now), creates tension is that all characters always feel like they’re in danger, whether it be from each other, from the law, or from their 19th century diet. In Away We Go, the protagonists don’t encounter many problems that a credit card can’t solve.

Hansen also uses many characters and these characters always come back, less they die (still, though, issues of the dead come back in this story). In Away We Go, peripheral characters are dropped when the protagonists move on to the next city. And I can see that the story may drop characters to effect--to enhance, and ultimately, perhaps, to embrace the isolation of their future. But the payoff isn’t there.

It seems to me that the writers of Away We Go deliberately avoid physical harm (or the threat of) as “too easy,” meaning that they want to raise the stakes for these characters in a more original way than physical pain. Indeed, most conflicts in this story are those between characters and the ways they live. The moments where the protagonists are discovering the bizarre lifestyles of family and old friends are the liveliest, funniest, and the ones that we’re probably supposed to have the most invested in.

But I don’t care about the two protagonists from Away We Go, probably because of their seemingly effortless existence. To me, the alternative Away We Go accepts in exchange for dropping the threat of the physical is a conflict of existence. How should we live? Where should we live? Who are our friends? Are we fuck-ups?

But, why should I care if you get married? Or, if you’re a fuck-up? Or, if you’re not a fuck-up, but everyone thinks you are? Or, you’re a fuck-up despite everyone thinking you’re not? Or, whatever.

I could go on and on and on and on about why I don’t care about this movie. I’ve done it in my head. It always comes back to the same thing. There isn’t much in this film that really surprises me. Maybe, it’s so believable it’s boring. Regardless, Away We Go can’t hold my attention because the story is too busy keeping its hands clean.