Go (102 minutes)
"I give head before I give favors and I don't even give my best friends head so your chances of getting a favor are pretty fucking slim."
Happy Ho-Ho-Holidays from The 90-Minute Movie! (Did that sound like a car commercial? …Because I wanted it to.) After a quick Thanksgiving break we’re back to kick off holiday movie season with a bang. Don’t forget you can give your friends and family the FREE gift of The 90-Minute Movie by sharing this post with them. I made it easy:
I’m kicking off the season with an anti-Christmas movie. No, it isn’t Die Hard (which actually, in my opinion is a Christmas movie, but more on that later). It’s 1999’s Go (102 minutes). An indie-turned-studio film made at the height of the 90’s “teen movie” craze that took over Hollywood. Go is very loosely set on Christmas Eve in LA and gives us an alternative view of the season in a way I really love. When I get sick of saccharine movies about families and the “magic of the season”, I put this on to balance myself out. It’s funny, dangerous and erratic.
Go is a triptych stemming from the same backroom exchange at a grocery store. When we finish one story we start all over again from the top: Simon (Desmond Askew) is looking for someone to cover his Christmas Eve shift so he can go to Vegas with his friends, Claire (Katie Holmes) is convinced he’ll never find anyone, and Ronna (Sarah Polley) ultimately takes the shift, despite having been on for 14 hours already, because she’s at risk of being evicted on Christmas Day. What begins as a regular retail Christmas Eve soon becomes a night of drug deals, a sting operation, a Vegas car chase, a rave and a lot more. Each of the stories overlap and intertwine, only revealing the full picture in the last 20 minutes or so.
Fun fact: you probably couldn’t afford to make Go today because nearly everyone involved would require a pretty hefty paycheck. This is a movie of stars! I don’t want this entire newsletter to be a Who’s Who of Hollywood names so I’ve tried to limit myself to writing about the folks who are foundational to the plot and the points I am making. But I do encourage you to check out the cast list on your own.
This movie essentially kick-started two major filmmaking careers: screenwriter John August (he would go on to write Charlie’s Angels, Big Fish and other Tim Burton movies) and Director Doug Liman (prior to Go he directed Swingers and went on to direct Bourne Identity). August’s Go script was actually a continuation of a short film August wrote while attending USC. What we’ve come to know as the “Ronna” segment (the first of the triptych) was actually his script named, X. So many of his readers expressed interest in the stories of Simon, a mid-level drug dealer that Ronna not only stands in for at the grocery store but also for a drug deal, and Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr), two soap opera stars who attempt to perform a sting on Ronna’s deal to clear their names with Officer Halverson (William Fichtner)-- that he expanded it into the final script we know as Go.
The script spoke to young director Liman more creatively than another script he had been offered at the time (Heartbreakers). He signed on despite warnings that if this indie film tanked (unlike Swingers which was wildly successful), he’d never be offered another big studio movie again. But Liman didn’t care. He was new to all of it and wanted to have fun making movies. (Do people do that anymore?) Liman uses Go to indulge in his directorial fantasies. In a particularly inventive scene, he manages to take us along for Manny’s (Nathan Bexton) trip on ecstasy. But even with some its more erratic and surreal moments, Go is successful because it remains grounded and the audience can keep up. A lot of reviews online liken Go to a “Pulp Fiction-lite”, watering down Liman’s own creativity. While I certainly believe the influence of Tarantino tropes during this time was probably hard to shake as a young director (I mean, there are trunk shots) I don’t think that means that Liman doesn’t necessarily have a distinct voice, which we can see later in his career as he ultimately settles into directing action and sci-fi films. (Edge of Tomorrow being a personal favorite of mine.)
Unlike a Tarantino flick, Go is a youth culture movie and stands on its own as such. (I mean, indie darling James Duvall makes an appearance as one of Simon’s friends!) It isn’t so much about its more violent moments like the drug deals gone wrong or accidental gunshots or Ronna being hit by a car, but about young people having a wild night out. It takes place on Christmas but no one is with their families, instead they’re all going to a rave, trying to make money, trying to get high, and trying to get laid. Everyone’s stuck in their cyclical nature of making bad choices masked by youth as good choices.
I’ve always particularly enjoyed how the three stories weave together as a result of everyone’s selfishness. Self interest is a great theme for any Christmas movie but in the case of Go, no one actually learns anything by the end. It’s purely anti-Christmas in this way. Even John McClaine in Die Hard learns to appreciate his wife and not let his ego get in the way any longer. But for the kids of Go? Nuh-uh.
Ronna, for example, ends up with the cash she needs for her rent by scamming her drug dealer Todd (Olyphant), scamming kids at the rave, abandoning her friend Manny. Sure, she gets hit by a car (revealed later to be driven by Adam and Zack) but she returns to work the next day which suggests her inability to break her cycle of bad choices. In the same segment Manny steals two pills of ecstasy from Ronna’s stash and trips the entire night. After waking up in a pile of trash and being picked up by Ronna and Claire he asks, “So what’re we doing for New Year’s?” I think we can all identify with the self-destructive years of our youth. It really does take awhile for those lessons to stick, doesn’t it?
The selfishness continues with Simon who manages to have a threesome in Vegas but leaves the minute the room goes up in flames. (Don’t ask me, just watch the movie.) From there he heads to a strip club where he and Marcus (Taye Diggs) are given one rule: don’t touch the women. And of course Simon touches the women. August works in a couple beats about race with Marcus earlier, but the one that lands hard is when the bouncer rushes in to reprimand the groping rulebreaker and immediately heads in Marcus’ direction. The dancer has to redirect him. It’s not groundbreaking, sure, but its presence is like a giant red arrow that says, “Simon’s held to a different standard! Simon’s not going to learn anything from this!” It is then Simon (do you see the pattern here?) who shoots the bouncer, sending him and Marcus on a wild Vegas car chase with the bouncer and club owner. Ultimately the Vegas guys catch up with Simon at Todd’s house and the group decides that the bouncer needs to shoot Simon in the arm for justice. Simon is almost gleeful about it, again suggesting that he hasn’t really learned from any lessons and misses entirely how his life is different from Marcus’.
Finally, we land on Adam and Zack, our soap opera stars who struggle to overcome their vanity and self-centeredness and who are challenged repeatedly to be better. They may be the only two who show an ounce (and just an ounce) of real change, as minute as it is. Zack whispers our title, “Go,” to Ronna during the sting and saves her from being arrested. But… they of course later hit her with their car and ditch her body… BUT they do go back to bury her, find her alive, decide to not murder her (yes this is their bar they need to meet) and instead bring her to the hospital. That’s a win! Adam attempts to expand his view on responsibility by suggesting that Ronna may still be in danger with Todd but Zack is quick to remind him, “Girl in ditch, our problem. Girl out of ditch, not our problem.” Like I said, the movement isn’t much, but it’s there.
There are great performances throughout Go but standouts to me are Sarah Polley, Timothy Olyphant and William Fichtner. I also just really, really love these actors. Sarah Polley may be an unfamiliar name to you as an actress, but she recently won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay last year for Women Talking. She’s brilliant and her portrayal of hardened Ronna is one of the best. Olyphant’s Todd the drug dealer is like a nice layered cake. He alternates between scary and soft over and over again. (He’s also just impossibly sexy which adds to his allure.) Fichtner is one of my favorite actors and I consider him one of the great character actors. I’ve written about him before on my Drowning Mona post, and you should go check it out. I just adore the energy he brings to every role. He is always earnest, always present, and that shines through his performances.
It’s also worth pointing out that while you may be unfamiliar with Go, you’re likely very familiar with its smash hit song, “Steal My Sunshine,” by Len which debuted on the movie’s soundtrack. So yes, Go is 1999 in a time capsule. And yes, it is the perfect anti-Christmas movie. If you feel that your usual holiday fare is getting to be too much, this may just be the perfect antidote to your troubles.
I’ll end by saying I find so much humor in the fact that Claire and Ronna show up to work the next day despite Ronna being hospitalized and Claire having just escaped a bizarre revenge hit at a drug dealer’s apartment. It is an extreme representation of what it feels like to be young and broke. You go out, you have a harrowing evening for one reason or another, do a bunch of shit you regret, and then you wake up the next day and go to work pretending you're fine and like nothing happened. And that’s youth I guess: ignoring what you can in search of the next great party. So, my friends. What’re we doing for New Years?
I actually saw this in the theater back in the day…loved it then and also when I watched it on repeat viewings over the years. It’s been a long time and l’ll have to revisit it. Great post as always!