Joseph Marohl

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I saw Away We Go yesterday afternoon with a couple of my colleagues at work. I thought the movie was rather wonderful, but my friend Kirsten didn’t much like the main male character’s cutesy boyishness or the exaggerated kookiness of the couple’s friends and family-and Steve, my other companion, mildly objected to the film’s episodic structure, bumpy even by typical road-movie standards-three valid points, however not nearly enough to diminish my enjoyment.

What do I like about Sam Mendes’ latest film? It’s my favorite of anything of his I’ve seen (including last year’s remarkable Revolutionary Road). Well, for one, it is a movie for adults-an R-rated movie that treats sexuality with honesty, even from its opening scene (which had the sort of matter-of-fact sexual frankness I have not often seen in American films since the 1970s). Not to say that the movie is a nudity fest, which it is not, but it handles sex as an ordinary, real part of love without sensationalizing it or obsessing over it. It helps that the screenplay is by novelists, husband-and-wife co-founders of the magazine The Believer, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida.

The movie has been compared a lot to Juno (2007), a highly praised movie I didn’t much care for. As a road movie, it also has some marked structural similarity to Little Miss Sunshine (2006), About Schmidt (2002), and especially Flirting with Disaster (1996).

Another reason for me to love Away We Go is the small but memorable cameo appearances by some of my favorite character actors-Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Allison Janney, Chris Messina, Catherine O’Hara, and Paul Schneider. Gyllenhaal shines as a trippy, wanna-be feminist earth mother, and Chris Messina is touching as a happy young husband and father. But I don’t want to say too much here. I would hate to spoil the movie’s little surprises, though, by further description.

The movie is a satire about romance, without falling into the twin traps of most movies that deal with romance and social satire: that is, sentimentality and cynicism. It is not a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again sort of romance. Rather refreshingly, I thought, the unmarried couple Burt and Verona (played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are indisputably in love from beginning to end-with no fluctuations whatsoever on that score.

They are full of love, respect, desire, and understanding for each other, but what they lack is a sense of belonging to the larger world. Verona fears that they are fuckups. Besides each other, they have no strong emotional connections to family or friends. At the beginning, circumstances unfold to force them out of their isolation and onto a trek across North America in search of a new home for themselves-and their first baby who is on the way.

Like most people in this situation, they follow job prospects and personal contacts, leading them to Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal, and Miami-where they encounter variations on the idea of couple-ness-people who are self-absorbed, materialistic, shrilly despairing and desperate, pretentiously “enlightened” and judgmental, burdened with a sense of loss, and, ultimately, unloved and unloving. At one point Verona senses that nobody else loves the way she and Burt do and panics at their utter isolation from the rest of the world.

This is the satirical point of the movie-the absence of love in all our talk about love and understanding. On that level, it’s a tiny bit like Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), without the infidelity. Everybody else Burt and Verona meet is a foil, emphasizing the genuineness and solidness of their love and commitment, even outside of marriage. A number of reviewers, including my friend Kirsten, felt that the other characters are sometimes cruelly caricaturized. In a way they are, but no more so than the characters viewed critically in comedies by, say, Woody Allen or the Coen brothers.

In his mostly favorable review, Roger Ebert raises the possibility that they are, instead, grotesques-that is, in the Winesburg, Ohio sense, characters who have one over- or under-developed spiritual quality that destabilizes and dwarfs every other aspect of their personality. As such, they are not so much individuals as manifestations of a sick society and its warped values.

But whether caricature or grotesque, the characters are what they are because (as in all satire) the storytellers have chosen to look at the rest of the world from a precise and individual moral stance-and satirists from Juvenal to Swift to Twain to Flannery O’Connor to Sacha Baron Cohen have all likewise been criticized as misanthropes for their coarse and cruel takes on those who fall outside the limits of their unique ethical perspectives. Unlike “soft” comedy, satire embraces many of the stark qualities of tragedy, too.

In other words, without being preachy, Away We Go is a film with a serious message. The audience is never beaten over the head with the message, and I imagine different people will take different ideas away from this movie. Antagonists to this message-the enthusiasms, bitterness, and pretenses of the minor characters-are indeed portrayed in a disparaging light.

And the message is about love-though hardly the naïve or jaded views we have come to expect from Hollywood entertainments.

What can we understand about (and through) love and commitment? What is the right way to live as a couple-or, for that matter, as a loner? And what promise does love hold for us and for those we love?

This movie offers an elegant yet not simple response to this eternal theme.

Russell Means

(Original Video Blog) As we all sit awestruck in front of the television, the computer, or the newspaper, Mr. Means offers us a solution to the current Global calamity. In his own beautifully articulated words, Mr. Means, explains both how the World got into this mess and how we can move back towards sanity and wholeness. We must, as he says, return to Matriarchy, a balance, respectful way of life where we celebrate our differences, rather than stifle, or even, destroy them.

Joseph Marohl

Last night Laurie and I had dinner at a Durham restaurant, Revolution, which opened last December, spending a good bit more money–$85 each, for drinks, appetizer, entrée, and dessert, including tip—than we intended to, but enjoying the excellent food along with the excellent conversation. The place was booked solid—we ate at the crowded bar—and our waitress said the place stays busy, suggesting that the local restaurant-going crowd has not been much affected by the economic crisis.

The place is one of those concrete and stainless steel places with hardwood floors, sleek rectangular design, with large television monitors surveying the activity back in the kitchen. (I just found out online that it’s the official VIP spot for the Durham Performing Arts Center.) Laurie and I shared pork dumplings and steak tartare for starters. I had lamb and she had beef for the entrée. Dessert was apple crisp with rum raisin ice cream for me, and salty chocolate pie for her. Definitely a place we’d both like to go back to, once we restock our checking accounts.

Our conversation covered a range of subjects—movies, home ownership, love, children, writing—but a good chunk of it was spent on discussing the question of what people want—people in general, our friends, finally ourselves.

Our answers to the question were complementary—she wants inner peace, I want to experience my present life vividly with few guards up.

In effect, we want the same thing. To be at peace is to be in tune to “the now” and, as Laurie and our friend Shane put it, to say “yes” to life. To be open to possibilities, to choose not to define too certainly what you want the future to be or what you think will make you happy or fulfilled is, on the other end, a path to inner peace.

I have of course been in situations where I needed something—a job, for instance—and so wanted a definite outcome to my actions—but on the whole I’ve lived the last 35 years of my life doing what pleases me or serves my sense of who I am moment by moment and discovering later, almost by surprise, where that takes me, good and bad.

Do I want love? Sure, if it comes. I have had (and lost) love on several occasions. I know it’s a mixed bag of elation and vulnerability, excitement and loss of control, joy and jealousy. I feel sorry for anyone who has never known love, but I also pity anyone enthralled with the idea of love to the point of an addiction to numbing, overly calculated nonstop relationships—what some call the “game of love.” I’m not good with games.

Do I want money? Of course. But only if it comes from being who and what I am and permits me to remain myself—which is less a matter of not changing than a question of whether I make my own change or let outside factors overly influence it.

Do I want to be alone? No. I need people—if for no other reason, as tools by which to sculpt my life. Alone, I am the rough material—the marble slab—but people (and events—chance, comedy, tragedy)—are the instruments of change and growth, through conversation, argument, assistance, opportunities, love, resistance, etc. As an extreme introvert, I fantasize life on a desert island or in a vessel in outer space, but that’s fantasy, and it always involves an unrealistic self-sufficiency and a number of “cheats,” such as the ability to conjure up a fantasy sex partner at will.

In college, I determined that I would read and study as much as possible (I do genuinely enjoy books), but if someone called up with an idea of something we could do together—and it was affordable and otherwise feasible—I would always abandon books in favor of human experience.

What do I want? I want inner peace. I want to avoid ruts, routines, narrowness of vision, knee-jerk reactions to a rapidly changing world. I want openness—the liberty to be true to myself, regardless of consequences or the judgments of other people. I want love and friendship, not for their own sakes, but for the joy and challenge of the moments shared with other people. I want enough money to carry on. I want to do good—I would like to be the person whom other people feel that their lives are better for knowing and being around.

I want to gather moments and impressions for my stockpile of memories, which are the raw material I use to make the meaning of my life.