I wasn’t much interested in seeing “Away We Go,” the new film from British director Sam Mendes, but then I decided it was the sort of movie that might benefit from low expectations. Which sounds like a back-handed compliment, I know, but in recent years I’ve soured on Mendes. I loved “American Beauty” when I saw it in theaters, and I’ve been waiting for him to direct another film that felt as fresh and as sharp. Instead he seemed to be regressing. I thought “The Road to Perdition,” which starred Tom Hanks as a Depression-era hit man, was actually pretty good, and that “Jarhead,” Mendes’ depiction of Marine life during Operation Desert Storm, had its moments. But his previous film, “Revolutionary Road,” was overheated and unpleasant, and it felt like Mendes was more interested in picking up Oscar nominations than creating a true work of art. It was an empty film, about empty people, and it made me more critical of his earlier work.

So when I heard the plot of “Away We Go” — quirky pregnant couple go on a road trip to figure out where to raise their unborn child — I just got annoyed. It sounded like he had made a Gen-X indie film about 15 years after such films went out of style, and I couldn’t see how he wouldn’t ruin it. But while “Away We Go” does have its smug and overly precious moments, it gains momentum as it goes along, and its final third is touching, bittersweet and almost transcendent, in a low-key, shambling way.

Grounding the film are two of the more endearing protagonists this year, Burt (John Krasinski, who plays Jim on “The Office”) and Verona (Maya Rudolph, formerly of “Saturday Night Live”), an unmarried couple who didn’t exactly plan on having a child, but now that they’re having one are determined to do the best they can. And because they’re living in a poorly heated trailer, and Burt’s selfish parents are moving to Belgium two month before the baby is due, they decide to go someplace new and rebuild their lives.

Krasinski and Rudolph make a delightful team, which is a good thing, because a lot of the people they meet up with on their road trip are completely insufferable. In Phoenix, there’s Verona’s former colleague, Lily (Allison Janney), who makes cruel jokes about her husband and children, even though they’re sitting right there. In Madison, they meet up with Burt’s old college friend, a spacey women’s studies professor (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who chooses to spell her name LN instead of Ellen. Around this point, I was starting to wonder how such a nice young couple ended up with such awful friends. The scenes with Janney and Gyllenhaal are amusing, but their characters are so broadly drawn, such caricatures, that they threaten to derail the entire film. I mean, it’s pretty easy to make fun of New Agey women’s studies professors, and drunken, bitter housewives. But a good movie would have something larger on its mind.

And “Away We Go” does. As the movie progresses, it becomes moving and subtly profound; we learn more about Burt and Verona, and we care about their predicament. Their problems are fairly minor, but they’re the sorts of problems lots of people have. And since there’s not exactly a glut of films about nice, normal people in their 30s, trying to navigate the challenges of every day life, I was happy to spend some time with Burt and Verona. I didn’t exactly relate to them, but they seemed like people I might know, and I could certainly understand how they felt when they arrived at the nice brownstone owned by friends from college, and gawked and talked about how grown-up everything seemed. The 30s are a funny time, because some people are very grown up, but many people are not, and other people, like Burt and Verona, are sort of in the middle. Your affection for Burt and Verona may depend on which of the three categories you fall (or fell, or would fall) into.

I should also mention that the script to “Away We Go” was written by Dave Eggers (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” “What is the What,”) and his wife, Vendela Vida, who founded the literary journal “The Believer.” So your affection for “Away We Go” may also depend on whether you like to read magazines like McSweeney’s and make fun of people who use the word ironic all the time.

As characters in movies go, Burt and Verona seemed pretty realistic, until I got home and watched some of “42 Up,” an installment in the ongoing documentary series that has chronicled the lives of a group of English men and women since they were 7 years old.

Director Michael Apted visits with these people every seven years, and they talk about their marriages, jobs and children. In “42 Up,” we see footage from the earlier films, which reminds us that, say, Tony was an energetic East London boy who said he wanted to be a jockey, briefly was a jockey, and then, in his 20s, became a cab driver. Or that Bruce was always good at math, wanted to be a missionary, taught briefly in Bangladesh, and now teaches in an East London school that serves minorities and the poor.

The people in the Up documentaries (the most recent, “49 up,” was released in 2005) are real people, with real problems, and it’s interesting to watch their lives unfold on screen. Some things change, while other things stay the same, and “42 Up” is a fairly moving experience, if you’ve watched the previous films. For instance, Bruce, a longtime bachelor, finally gets married. Of course, other people have gotten divorced. And sometimes re-married. These documentaries are a good reminder that, although we may sometimes relate to the people in the movies, life, and people, is rarely as cut and dried as Hollywood usually makes it seem. “Away We Go” feels both true and false, which is an odd combination indeed.

The next “Up” documentary installment, “56 Up,” will likely be released in 2012.

Got a comment? Add yours below or e-mail me at sfoss@dailygazette.net.