Un lugar donde quedarse

Sam Mendes para mí representa a un director que no supera su sombra en forma de Belleza americana. Ha establecido el listón demasiado alto y también creo que los dramas/comedias románticas no le sientan bien en absoluto, este proyecto fue aún más débil que Camino a la perdición, donde al menos se podía centrar en las excelentes actuaciones. Aquí, la pareja principal es bastante antipática, Mendes no se benefició al apostar por caras desconocidas. Él es un tonto presumido y ella es una ratón aburrido. Juntos, visitan parejas aún más antipáticas y desquiciadas, especialmente los padres son realmente poco creíbles. Ese es precisamente el problema de Mendes, al igual que en Camino a la perdición, sus personajes son poco confiables, sin vida, como si intentara retratar la realidad de las personas comunes, pero esos personajes que crea y las situaciones en las que los pone son ridículos y en última instancia, increíbles. Si Mendes quiere volver a subir al pedestal, debería volver a sus raíces. (17.01.2010)

A heartfelt affair, but more for Mendes than for me, about the fact that life after thirty doesn’t need to be stressful and also “how to go on in life". Just a nice prequel to Mendes’ previous movie. With one difference. The central duo are nice guys that you see far too little of on screen, so I was wishing with all my heart for them not to settle at the Revolutionary Road address, so avoiding the fate that met Frank and April Wheeler. (03.08.2009)

The criticisms that many are sure to have toward the film are certainly justified, but I can't do otherwise given the perfectly positive atmosphere. In a way, Mendes is actually still doing the same thing, but it's a little different this time and it works (for me). This time he succeeded by betting on the "ordinariness" of the plot and fantastic actors. It’s ninety minutes that caress the soul, with the bonus of a beautiful ending. (28.09.2009)

The first film by Sam Mendes, which I had never seen, but as they say, when you have to, you have to. The fact is that I hadn't missed out on anything. Some movies provoke me, but this one simply put me to sleep. This title could be a synonym for the word boredom for me. I admit that I didn't have the strength to finish it, and 15 minutes before the end, I gave up, even though I usually make up for it by fast-forwarding. I just seriously found myself in stasis with the characters and their confessions. Don't ask me what the film was about because if I remember correctly, it was ten o'clock in the morning when I started watching it, and I counted about eight micro naps. It's a strange road movie about people and situations that were supposed to be interesting and funny, but none of that happened for me. Overall impression: 20%. (09.04.2012)

One rule I follow to grant a five star rating to a film is getting goosebumps while watching it. In Away We Go I felt them in basically every scene with a song, so very often. The story is not very original, but Mendes’s subtle and sensitive approach to the narration turns an ordinary “roaringly independent” comedy-drama into something more than a movie that you will forget overnight. Where Czech comedies full of ordinary Czech people try to look real, Mendes’s latest film looks exactly like that, even though you (almost) don’t see the kind of ordinary people that would be familiar to us. Away We Go captivated me in several ways: the stroller scene was comedy gold, the playful shot of the plane taking off, the scene at the bar, the romantic climax  on a trampoline, and the new home. And it’s not by chance that these moments are smartly placed apart from the course of the film, this is what it looks like when a film is made by someone who knows exactly what they are doing. I wanted to give it four stars, because at first I felt that the last two episodes had lost some of the pace and the humour, but then I realised that they had their place in the story and the ending wouldn’t have worked out well without them. 9/10% PS: What’s most interesting is that you can’t choose the best film from Mendes’s family drama trilogy (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road and Away We Go), because each of them is very different and can’t be compared to the others. (30.07.2009)