Sam Mendes has made a number of films about the dark side of family life: American Beauty, Road to Perdition, and Revolutionary Road. Dave Eggers came to the public’s attention through his book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, about how after his parents died when he was twenty-one he took on the task of raising his younger brother. In Away We Go, they combine (Mendes directs, Eggers co-writes with his wife, Vendela Vida) to bring a serio-comic examination of the meaning of family and just what it means to be an adult.
When is it we become all grown up? Never mind legal ages for consent or drinking. How do we know we’ve reached adulthood? Since I’ll soon be a grandfather, one would expect that I’m adult, yet there are times I wonder. I suppose it’s a matter of insecurity that makes me question just how mature I really am. In Away We Go, Burt and Verona are in their thirties and have been together for many years, even though they aren’t married. When Verona becomes pregnant, they begin to look at their lives and their impending parenthood and the insecurities cause them to ask, “Are we fuck-ups?” As they begin to think about the responsibilities before them, the life they have doesn’t seem to be what they think they need it to be.
Part of their problem is that they are without roots: Verona’s parents are dead; Burt’s are heading off to live in Belgium. They travel to various places trying to connect with old co-workers, siblings, cousins, college friends. They want some sort of model for what they want their family to be. Each situation offers up its own problems and insecurities. Some are too self-indulgent; some are overindulgent of their children. There are those who seem to have it together, but there are unseen currents to their lives that betray the veneer of happiness.
At issue isn’t a matter of age, experience or maturity; it is a question of wisdom. Wisdom is a difficult quality to quantify. It’s not an accumulation of what we know or what we have done. It isn’t applying various rules and logic. It is the ability to live in the world with some measure of happiness and fulfillment. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is structured much as this film has been put together. In the film we see possible models that are suggested will bring fulfillment, but after each we see that this too is flawed. The author of Ecclesiastes tried various paths to find wisdom and fulfillment, but each way had its own flaws. Both Ecclesiastes and Away We Go offer a variety of paths to fulfillment, but then say, “No, it’s not this. No, it’s not this either. No, not this either.”
It should be noted that Robert K. Johnston, in his book Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film, called Mendes’s American Beauty the quintessential Ecclesiastes film. His American Beauty and his other earlier films about families have always focused on the failures of families. It would be possible to read this film as a lighter version of that theme since each family we see ends up not being adequate for finding wisdom. But in the end the film reaches the same conclusion that the author of Ecclesiastes came to: “Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved of what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy your life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life.” (Ecc. 9:7-9)
Away We Go is a much more hopeful view of family life than Mendes’s earlier films in spite of so many examples of families with problems. It offers us a chance to see that adulthood and wisdom may be something that we can discover even if we, like Burt and Verona, might be fuck-ups.
