Ironically, director Sam Mendes’s first grounded, likeable and happy couple arrives on screen at about the same time he separates from wife Kate Winslet. ‘Away We Go’ is a relationship movie where the couple doesn’t need to evolve, as they are already perfect
There’s something remarkable, refreshing and truly likeable with the happily pregnant couple Verona and Burt in director Sam Mendes’s latest Away We Go. But there’s also something that keeps us at bay from connecting with these characters. That’s Mendes for you – with his distant cinema and his characters who always stay at arm’s length from the audience, these are characters who don’t require empathy but instead yearn for sympathy.
The film signals a change from Mendes’s previous offerings: American Beauty, one of the most overrated movies of all time, gave us little more than caricatures of a suburban family. Furthermore, his best movie to date, Revolutionary Road, gave us stilted characters – but that was the mid-1950s in suburban America, and it was cool to be stilted.
