Away We Go

François Duhamel/Focus Features

Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski as a couple about to have a daughter in “Away We Go,” directed by Sam Mendes.

Are we screw-ups? Verona wonders aloud. (I’m paraphrasing.) She and her boyfriend, Burt, expecting their first child, live in a ramshackle, poorly heated house and drive a boxy old Volvo. They are maybe a little scruffy, but they seem, objectively, to be doing all right, with jobs that don’t require them to go to work and a relationship that looks tender and durable.

 

François Duhamel/Focus Features

Mr. Krasinski and Ms. Rudolph.

Verona’s question may or may not be disingenuous, but the answer provided by “Away We Go,” the slack little road comedy in which it arises, is unambiguous. Far from being screw-ups, Verona and Burt, played with passive-aggressive winsomeness by Maya Rudolph and Jon Krasinski, are manifestly superior to everyone else in the movie and, by implication, the world.

And even though they express themselves with a measure of diffidence, it’s clear that they are acutely, at times painfully, aware of their special status as uniquely sensitive, caring, smart and cool beings on a planet full of cretins and failures.

The smug self-regard of this movie, directed by Sam Mendes from a script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, takes a while to register, partly because Ms. Rudolph and Mr. Krasinski are appealing and unaffected performers and partly because the writing has some humor and charm. The opening scene, which finds the couple in bed, is disarmingly sweet and candid in its depiction of the sexual rapport of longtime lovers. There is real intimacy and affection between them, which is wonderful until, before too long, it becomes as insufferable as the songs by Alexi Murdoch, which similarly wear out their rueful, faux-naïve welcome.