BURT (JOHN KRASINSKI) BEING INSUFFERABLY CUTE WITH VERONA (MAYA RUDOLPH) ON AN AIRPLANE

Needed: synonyms for "twee"

This third and least successful screen attempt by Sam Mendes to show us what America is like comes from a screenplay written by Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida. This is a road trip involving a thirty-something couple, Burt Farlander (John Krasinski) and Verona de Tessant (Maya Rudolph). Verona is six months pregnant. Verona's parents are dead. Burt's (Catherine O'Hara, Jeff Daniels) whom they've moved to Denver to be near, announce that they are going to live in Antwerp, Belgium for two years, starting just before the baby will be born. They go out in search of family or support visiting siblings, college friends, former coworkers, thinking of finding a place where they can live with their new baby and have some human warmth nearby.

We know how these American road trips go, from David O. Russell's to Payne Anderson's. They're tours of absurdity, examinations of questionable lifestyles. This time the attention is on aberrations in child-rearing. The couple winds up settling near no one, taking, it appears, an empty, dilapidated house in a southern mansion style in an unspecified place (Florida, perhaps, or Louisiana?), which opens up front and back to let the light and air through and looks out on a body of water. They have three months to get it ready. They decide it's "perfect." Despite going through the motions of self-questioning, they are exceedingly pleased with themselves and their prolonged immaturity. They know they're not losers. Everybody else is.

Some of the families Burt and Verona visit are unpleasant, and the others are unhappy. All are drawn with a very heavy hand. This works for some of the actors. Alison Janney is effective as the boorish wife of a drunken husband, a mother who talks crudely and abusively of her own two children right in front of them, demonstrating that to the kids, her words are just "white noise.' The airport arrival tells it all. She goes on about how fat Verona is, and her husband (Jim Gaffigan) takes the gift wine out of Burt's paper bag and goes to look for an opener. Maggie Gyllenhaal is impressive as "LN," an insufferable woman (but they're all insufferable!) with lots of money who shares weird ideas about family togetherness and sex with her husband (Josh Hamilton). Despite the caricature, Gyllenhaal is subtly creepy.

It's hard to look forward to the next visit as Burt and Verona go from Denver to Phoenix to Tucson to Madison to Montreal to Florida, and none of the places are distinguished from each other except by temperature. One airport turns the couple away on suspicion that Verona is eight months pregnant rather than six, and they take the train. They have a succession of rental cars and everywhere they go they are plied with liquor.

If things could possibly go any more downhill that comes in Montreal, where Burt and Verona love the parents they visit, who have six adopted children, till they go to amateur night at a bar that has pole dancing and the husband (Chris Messina) reveals that his wife (Melanie Lynskey) just had one of many miscarriages and that they are both miserable.

Earlier in an airport a lady comes up with a boy she is obtrusively instructing, and then she asks him a question and he recites a little speech full of horrible menace -- something about trying to smother his sister. Does this mean parents who push their kids too hard to learn stuff will create monsters? What kind of nonsense is that?

Throughout the screenplay is an incongruous combination of keen observation -- it does give some sense of capturing the repetitious and bland rhythms of middle-class thirty-something speech patterns -- and completely artificial, mean, doctrinaire caricature. In Russell's Flirting with Disaster there was a search for parents in which the satirical encounters were hilarious and unexpected. In Alexander Payne's Sideways (let's skip over About Schmidt; which also descends into meanness and caricature), the incidents are genuine revelations of character. We don't really learn anything about Burt and Verona. I'm not even convinced that they do what they say to make money. Her parents are dead (a reflection of Eggers' own early loss of parents?) and his are self-centered and soon to be absent. The others we'd rather not know about. When they go to see Burt's brother in Florida (Paul Schneider) it's because his wife has left him, and he is simply incapable of making the best of it. Another example of how marriage and child-rearing can go wrong.

At the heart of the story are, of course, Burt and Verona, and there's no there there. The actors are pleasant enough, but what their characters have to say to each other, with all its self-absorption and unendurable cuteness, should have stayed with them. To talk about this movie you need to get a thesaurus and look up synonyms for "twee." The "emo" music is sweet and obtrusive, treacle on top of the icing.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.