The Hungry, Homesick Hipster

We’re not particularly big movie buffs in my house; I think that in the ten years we’ve been together, Susan and I have seen maybe six, total. I don’t remember most of them. But recently we launched an experiment: the only television we actively watch is PBS, Andrew Zimmern, Bourdain, and sometimes, The Office (although rarely, because it looks far too much like my office, which I’d frankly rather leave at work). So why not cut way back and join Netflix instead? We did, and so far, so good. Of course, most of the rentals have had some connection to food, except for the most recent one, Away We Go. Or so I thought.

I didn’t know much about this movie, admittedly, and expected two hours of hipster angst; the wonky glasses, the studied sloppiness, the flannel shirts, the beards, the indefinable ennui. And there was a good amount of that, certainly in the character of Burt Farlander, played by John Kasinski, who, together with his wife Verona, played by Maya Rudolph, have one foot in adulthood and one in screaming immaturity (evidenced by the frequent use of sophomoric language) and always look like they’re about to cry. But there was a lot more.

There was a lot of hunger.

Short version, if you haven’t seen it: Burt and Verona, an unmarried couple in their mid-30s are about to have a baby. They live in Colorado, and when his self-indulgent yahoo parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels) announce that they’re going to Antwerp a month before the baby is due, they decide that it’d be a good idea to relocate and make a home for themselves someplace where they have a connection—to close friends, to a sister, to a brother, to a former boss. And that’s what the movie’s about: trying to figure out where home is, based on external stimuli.

Naturally, what they find wherever they go are packs of crazies, misfits, and malcontents: They travel to Phoenix to visit friends Lily and Lowell, who, together with their children, run the gamut from inappropriately rude to just this side of lobotomized. A wildly pretentious, neo-new age childhood friend in Madison, Wisconsin eschews strollers and nurses her children until they’re big enough to attend graduate school. Burt’s brother’s wife has just run out on him and their kid, in Miami. Wherever they go, it’s like a visit to the Island of Misfit Toys.

In Arizona, they see Verona’s bad relationship-prone sister. Up in Montreal, their friends Tom and Munch (the former played by Chris Messina, of Julie & Julia fame) have adopted a small brood of children, and it’s revealed, when Munch does a public pole dance at a bar, that she’s just had a fifth miscarriage.

You can see it: Burt and Verona are voraciously hungry for family and stability—all those things that they believe mean home—but they desperately search for it through other people. And the individual denouement at almost every location they visit happens around food.

Is food the binding factor in our lives? Does it hasten decision? When we eat with others, does food become the means through which we know what is possible in our lives, and what isn’t?

Does food mitigate neuroses and fear?

At the end of their visit to Montreal, Verona and Burt and their friends sit together in a diner, where Tom, opining on the meaning of life and family, constructs a home out of a plate of food. The syrup—the love—is what holds the home together. External factors—geography, crazy family, troubled friends—have nothing to do with it. Saccharine, perhaps, but there you have it.

There’s no spoiler alert here; Verona and Burt find home in the most obvious of places—the house where she grew up, to which she hasn’t returned since the death of her parents when she was in her twenties. What still hangs on the barren orange tree on the property—the remnants of a tradition started when her father planted it and it failed to blossom? The only bit of color in an otherwise gray landscape: the plastic fruit that she and her sister and mother hung years before, and that create an Eden amidst the ghost of a childhood refuge that’s been all but abandoned for more than a decade.

Proving the point: if you look for the food, you’ll almost always find the home.