Away We Go - Instant Win Contest
Wednesday, June 10th @ 7:30PM
Mayan Theater, 1st & Broadway, Denver

The fifth film by British theater director Sam Mendes, Away We Go, was made while he was still in post-production for last year's Revolutionary Road, a film that was dependent on its form and staginess, and there's a sense that Away was made as a sort of counterpoint not only to the familial dread of Road but also to its style.

It is also the screenwriting debut of the wildly post-modern novelist Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, novelist and co-founder of literary zine The Believer. Being the recent parents of two children, there's certainly a self-reflexive quality to their script, which tells of the travels of a pair of expecting parents attempting to find a proper home for their awaited progeny.

In the beginning, they already have a home. Burt Farlander and his longtime girlfriend Verona are expecting his parents to help out, but the elder Farlanders unexpected plan to move to Belgium and send the couple on the road to find a new home. Punctuated by black title-boards that announce each location, they begin in Phoenix where they visit both an old boss and her husband and Verona's sister Grace and end with Burt's recently-separated brother Courtney in Miami.

The movie is often engaging and funny as the couple bop around from Janney's madly neglectful mother-of-two to a pair of hilarious and horrifying new-agers and finally to their married best friends from college, Tom and Munch. Each pair is an example of what could go wrong as parents and Burt and Verona eventually come to their own conclusions about how to raise their child.

(Review thanks to worstpreviews.com)