DVD review: Away We Go

A couple goes on a trip around the USA looking for a new place to live.

This movie confirms what we suspected all along. If you put an artsy director on a rom-com lite movie in the end you get the same old same old recycled and obvious stuff.

Sam Mendes is a critics’ darling. Starting from the depressing American beauty, then with the bleak “Road to Perdition” and ending with the even more depressing “Revolutionary Road” he established himself as the king of “serious” cinema.

Now we get to this movie which he actually conceived as a companion piece to “Revolutionary Road”, but where “Revolutionary Road” was utterly depressing this is supposed to be upbeat and quirky with a couple that stays in love from the beginning till the end.

It is strange then that after the movie we got a sense of foreboding and depression even superior to “Revolutionary Road”. I don’t know how, maybe because in the former movie they actually inflicted all the angst upon themselves while here they are clearly good intentioned, and they remain in love by the way, for the whole movie which is nice and surprising. Anyway here they are clearly good intentioned but they meet so much bleakness, so much unhappiness that really the end message seem to be, they are happy “for now” but in the end the pressure of society will drive them apart, one way or another.

So in the end it looks like Sam Mendes is utterly unable to make an upbeat movie, he got a few chuckles out of us but in the end his cynical viewpoint is unrelenting.

I’ll skip it if I were you, go and rent a dumb rom com, is better for your general well being.