"I hope so. I really fucking hope so."

Away We Go ***

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph
Catherine O'Hara, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan
Carmen Ejogo, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton
Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey, Paul Schneider

Leaving behind his sterile formalism and working in a very relaxed style, Sam Mendes directs his first movie that feels refreshingly un-directed.
For someone that has specialized in the deconstruction of characters surrounded by pristine art direction and/or obvious camera moves, this tale of two people looking for a home, comes as a delightful surprise.
Burt (Krasinski) and Verona (Rudolph) are a couple in their mid-thirties who are expecting their first child. They live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere where they indulge in practices they have carried on from their college days.
But this won't do for their baby. With that in mind they set on a journey across North America to find the perfect place to settle.
First they go to Burt's parents (played splendidly by O'Hara and Daniels) who reveal they are moving to Antwerp and are just starting to live the lives people in their twenties desire.
Then it's off to Phoenix where they are greeted by Verona's former boss Lily (Janney) and her husband (Gaffigan). Lily calls herself a nutcase and insists that her little daughter is a dyke while her husband listens tolerantly.
After their awkward meeting they take a detour to see Verona's little sister (Ejogo) in Tucson with whom the film takes a turn for the purely bittersweet as the sisters remember their deceased parents.
After this they go to Madison to see Burt's childhood friend Ellen (a loopier, and oddly sexier, than ever Gyllenhaal), a college professor, who with her husband Rod (Hamilton), has taken to New Age-y parental practices that include them having sex in front of the kids.
They run away from this all the way to Montreal where they encounter college friends Tom (Messina) and Munch (Lynksey) who seem to have the perfect married life, but actually have deep pain.
Last, but not least, they go to Miami to see Burt's brother Courtney (Schneider, great as usual) whose wife recently abandoned him, leaving him alone to raise his young daughter (Isabelle Moon Alexander).
After life shows them all the possible people they can become, conveniently arranged in cinematic moral hierarchy, they have to decide where to move and who they most want to resemble.
As if they'd forgotten to decide the destination of their journey before leaving, they might always end up finding themselves where they began.
Luckily for such an aimless road trip, Krasinski and Rudolph keep the movie grounded and fascinating at every moment.
Even if the supporting characters are comprised of archetypes, weirdos and plain indie quirky clichés, they make Burt and Verona real people.
More than that, they make them people who are genuinely in love with each other ("I will love you even if I can't find your vagina" says Burt in a way that sounds breathtaking), for whom the problems of finding "the one" are done and over with.
When most movies settle for making the discovery of love the ultimate goal of life, this movie reminds us there's more than that and that life is a process.
"We're not fuck ups" they say at the beginning of the movie and they spend the rest of it showing us people who might as well be.
This comparison isn't condescending because truth is anyone watching the movie will try to empathize with them and see that after all they are not that bad.
In a lovely scene Burt proposes to Verona for the umpteenth time (she doesn't think marriage is necessary). She rejects him once more, but to ease his fear she ends up making promises from a list Burt comes up with spontaneously.
Mendes' delicate direction here isn't intrusive, but we know we are witnessing a making of vows more significant than anything we'd see at a wedding.
This is the film's best thing, not the big scenes with lots of characters, but the small intimate moments when we see Burt and Verona cuddle and lie quietly next to each other.
When they have to travel by train, they lie awake in their bunk beds, Ellen Kuras' spare cinematography suggests a void, and before long Burt has moved down to be with his girl.
Musicalized with Alexi Murdoch's lovely songs and with art direction that feels lived in more than anything, "Away We Go" is the kind of movie that indie filmmakers would die to produce, but has none of the pretentious resolutions we find in them more and more.
Perhaps a strike of good luck, or mere exhaustion (as the film was shot during a break Mendes took from "Revolutionary Road") we might leave not knowing if Burt and Verona found what they seeked.
But Mendes has finally achieved maturity.

Revolutionary Road ***

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet
Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, Zoe Kazan, David Harbour
Kathryn Hahn, Richard Easton

The suburbs have been the mythical creature of innumerable films; it's within the picket fences and tree lined roads where some of the darkest machinations behind American culture have occurred.
Seen by the cynical as the place where dreams go to die, the notion that anyone who holds esteem towards these values is a killer robot or an alien has spoken more about the people who say it, than their actual discourse has done for them.
But when we are invited to view them under a critical light in a context that includes several other variables instead of just one accusing finger, the suburbs can turn out to be much more complex than we'd imagined.
And to explore this ambiguity seemed to be the intention of Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road", an adaptation of Richard Yates' cult novel about the Wheelers, Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet), a couple who moves to the suburbs where they find their dreams crumbling before their eyes.
Frank works as an "executive" in a city based company where not even he's sure of what he does, while April stays home looking after the house and their children.
They socialize with the neighbors which include real estate agent, the gossipy Mrs.Helen Givings (an excellent Bates), her son John (Shannon) who has recently been released from a mental institution and the Campbells, Shep (Harbour who does miracles with the little scenes he's given) and Milly (Hahn).
The Wheelers find comfort in their knowledge that they're above everyone else. That the executive lunches, martini breaks and egg salad sandwiches are just a waiting room for the grand life they have ahead of them.
But when April realizes they are slowly giving in to convention, she takes action and comes up with a plan for them to move to Paris where she will work while Frank "finds himself".
Early on the film announces it will be mostly about marital problems and for this it becomes a showcase for its two lead actors who are phenomenal.
DiCaprio, ever more maturing, imbues Frank with the kind of fear only lessened by the fact that you may have seen it in people you know.
His eagerness to please and a sense of "deserving" everything promised with post-WWII America, but not getting it or at least not in the way he expected, touches on a sensitive part of you.
With April, Winslet goes for earnestness avoiding the melodrama one would come to expect from a hysterical housewife. She throws tantrums and most of the time sparks up fights she knows she shouldn't be holding, but there is something remarkably human about April that makes these things comprehensible, maybe the fact that a sense of emasculating her husband is one of the only things that make her feel alive.
Her eyes often wonder "how did we get here?" and her nuances are what give April the soul the movie never obtains. Talking to a friend she confesses how "she wanted in" not escaping and in the same scene she goes from moving and confessional to raw and sexual without us expecting it.
Eventually we wonder if April is putting on a performance all the time. Winslet taps into this element to make us doubt our very surroundings.
DiCaprio and Winslet convey this angst beautifully and turn "Revolutionary Road" into the movie that chronicles the implicitness other dysfunctional suburbia films have taken for granted.
Shannon's character then comes and questions everything about the Wheelers in a way nobody else dared to, think of him as a contemporary viewer interceding for all who have doubts about why people choose these lives.
Because if there is something true about the film is that its themes are as relevant as ever. John whose insanity might receive a milder diagnosis nowadays, has so many questions that he can't contain them and Shannon holds up remarkably well, given how other actors would've dealt with this character.
He represents a rage that most would opt to hide and in his final scene creeps under your skin and gives the film what ultimately becomes it's one undeniable truth.
Mendes crafts a work that is easy to admire, giving it a nice structure and an adequate pace, if the symbolism is nothing too new (enough with the pastels and light! Give us a film about suburbia inspired by German Expressionism!), it's talking to us in the only terms the director knows how and this is perhaps because even he's unsure of what he's trying to say.
The director puts out a troubling representation of traditional values, that nevertheless offers no option. It's like a window to hell from inside a burning house.
If he gets one thing right is the idea that the one thing humans can share is their misery, especially in the last scene where he tries to send us away with an ironic wink at a how it all will become a vicious cycle, but feels more like how Frank is described at the beginning of the film "a smartass with a big mouth" or camera in this case.
Throughout the film something that remains constant is the carelessness for the children, they are barely featured and the characters themselves' are rarely asked for opinion.
They appear purely as accesories and perhaps without trying Mendes makes the most lasting impression with them.
By not taking them into account he makes their consequent story the only one we're dying to hear.