Far from being another Jim Halpert clone, Krasinski's character Burt is a scruffy, distracted intellectual who feels like he has to do a complete personality 180 in order to do his over-the-phone insurance futures job. And he actually seems to like the work, if the zeal he brings his sports-loving good ol' boy persona is any indication, just as Rudolph's quiet, reserved Verona enjoys drawing pictures of gruesome medical procedures for textbooks. Rudolph has some good lines, but Verona is essentially the straight man in the comedy duo, and she tolerates for Burt's occasional wackiness, occasionally even welcoming it.

But two actors I like appearing in the same film together does not a good movie make (see Heath Ledger and Monica Bellucci in The Brothers Grimm). No, there are other factors. The storyline, which centers around the hopes and fears surrounding their unborn child, hit me particularly close to home, being a new father myself, but I can only imagine that any 30-something hipster mother or father would feel the same way about it. When the couple finds out that Burt's parents (the hysterically insensitive Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels) are moving to Belgium a month before their grandchild will be born, Burt and Verona decide that they no longer need to live where they are, since their house is a shambles and they have no other friends in the area. That leads them on a cross-country trip to visit all of their friends and relatives, to see where they want to live, and, as an unexpected bonus, what kind of parents they want to be.

Because, their friends? They're variously good and bad at parenting, and their failures parallel their adopted cities. In blazingly hot Phoenix, Allison Janney and her husband Jim Gaffigan speak harshly, both in their tone of voice (Janney is loud and crass, Gaffigan sullen and slurring) and in what they say in front of the children. In a Colorado college town, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton take book-based parenting to the extreme, which includes late breast feeding, extreme co-sleeping and a total rejection of strollers. In hopping Montreal, Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey seem to be the perfect parents to their adopted, multi-ethnic brood, but there's more darkness there than meets the eye. Plus, Verona and Burt each get some face time with their respective siblings (Carmen Ejogo and Paul Schneider) where they get to talk about the death of Verona's parents and Verona's subsequent unwillingness to legally commit to Burt.

But I'm getting too bogged down in the plot. What matters is there is heartstring-tugging, but just when you think the movie's going to overdose on cheese, Burt or Verona says something self-deprecating (or, often, other-person-deprecating) to put an edge on it. And thank God, because I'm allergic to schmaltz. The folksy soundtrack by Nick Drake soundalike Alexi Murdoch (not a bad person to sound like, really) gives the whole proceeding a Garden State vibe, and the appearance of classic tracks by George Harrison and the Velvet Underground loan it a High Fidelity pedigree. (Other movies this movie reminds me of: Little Miss Sunshine, Smart People, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind minus the memory loss.)

Aside from kinda liking American Beauty and Road to Perdition, I wouldn't have expected a Sam Mendes film to touch me like this one did. (Yes, it touched me. I'll admit it. There's something about unshaven, smugly superior characters -- and directors, I guess -- that I see myself in, and Burt's worries were intimately familiar to me.) There are still some Mendes movies I need to see, but I doubt they'll be as much fun as this one was. Which leaves me waiting with bated breath for writer David Eggers' next film, Where the Wild Things Are, which he co-wrote with director Spike Jonze. Not a problem, since I was looking forward to it already. I may even have to go back and read some of his books, because all I have is one McSweeney's collection, funny though it is. Write more movies, Dave -- I ain't got time to read.

Away We Go opens tomorrow everywhere. Go away, then come back to let us know what you thought of it below.