Mendes hiccup

I’ve been on board for most every Sam Mendes film since the director made his heralded debut in 1999.  Even “Jarhead,” which was a big disappointment, had a lot of interesting ideas concerning the alienation of war and its effects on soldiers.

I still think  last year’s “Revolutionary Road” (DVD coverage from John here) was a sublime work of art, but “Road to Perdition” probably remains his best work to date.  It’s an intriguing portfolio.  But “Away We Go” has been a troubling speed bump for me.

I saw the film weeks ago and wanted to give it another go before committing to an opinion, but I don’t know.  The desire to wallow in its stereotypes and weirdly skewed view of the world just hasn’t been there.

Variety’s Dennis Harvey has written a review that kind of sums up my feelings, for the most part.  I might not have been as harsh, but I understand feeling the need to do so:

…the protags are essentially blank slates, despite the skill and charm Krasinski and Rudolph bring to the roles. It’s their job simply to represent “normal” against so many illustrations of bad parenting, worse marriages and damaged adulthood. But given they’re such harmlessly pleasant folk, why don’t they have any non-messed-up friends?

Because that would un-stack the deck in a script that needs to paint them as two lonely souls in a hostile world. But in positing normal as special, the pic requires caricaturing almost everyone else.

While handled by resourceful actors, the foibles of the supporting characters are less funny than they are forced and unpleasant. Janney and Gyllenhaal in particular play figures venomously conceived.

Meant to amp up the pic’s indie-quirky cred, the soundtrack, papered with lyrically trite soundalike cuts by Scottish singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch, instead makes progress seem more meandering and monotonous. Other design/tech contributions are solid. Still, this alternately condescending and hazy material doesn’t trigger the kind of sharp aesthetic choices Mendes and collaborators made in response to past projects from “American Beauty” to “Revolutionary Road.”

The big question this raises in my mind is, what will Focus Features have to work with come Oscar season?  Considering this and the rather cool reception to Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock” at Cannes, half of the live-action slate is somewhat dubious now.  No one at the studio has been positioning either “Away We Go” or “Taking Woodstock” as Oscar product, of course (that’s what bozos like me who predict things a year in advance do), but there is an effort from the Coen brothers still to come.  And the studio has the foreign distribution rights for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful.”

Maybe there’s a festival pick-up in the mix.  Or maybe Focus will sit 2009 out, setting sights to future efforts from Kevin Macdonald and Noah Baumbach.  Nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, more on all of this Monday when the latest Off the Carpet column and Oscar chart update lands.