Go (dir. Doug Liman, 1999)
It has been twenty five years since the release of Pulp Fiction. That film and the rest of Quentin Tarantino’s directorial work have been canonized, and rightfully so, I think. They are formally audacious, memorable, and strangely inimitable given how many aspects of the films are homages, lifts, recontextualizations, and straight ripoffs of other work.
That, of course, did not stop literally everyone from trying to do just that in the second half of the nineties. The Tarantino knockoff was practically its own subgenre, self-aware crime stories with heightened characters, clever dialogue, and discussions of pop cultural ephemera to establish that, yes, these guys do occasionally think about something other than murder and mayhem. Among the films that fit this mold are Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, Suicide Kings, 2 Days in the Valley, The Way of the Gun, and the film I will be discussing here: the Christmas set crime comedy Go.
Directed by Swingers helmer Doug Liman from a script by John August, Go could uncharitably be called Pulp Fiction for morons. This is unfair. A better way to put it is that is Pulp Fiction about morons. Set during the Christmas holiday in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, it follows three interlocking stories about individuals involved to varying degrees in nineties drug culture.
The first concerns Ronna (Sarah Polley), a cashier at a supermarket who is about to be evicted from her apartment. Her British coworker and sometimes ecstasy dealer Simon (Desmond Askew) has fucked off to Las Vegas for a couple of days. When Adam and Zack (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr) approach her to purchase some product, Ronna sees a way out of her predicament. With her coworkers Claire and Manny (Katie Holmes and Nathan Bexton), she convinces menacing, but hot drug supplier Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant) to sell to her.
Things spiral out from there.
Meanwhile in Las Vegas, Simon, who is the literal dumbest man alive, is having some very broish misadventures with Marcus (Taye Diggs) and fellow travel companions Tiny and Singh (Breckin Meyer and James Duval). This includes but is not limited to: stealing Todd Gaines’s credit card to get a better rate at a hotel, having a threesome that results in a hotel room going up in flames, violations of strip club etiquette, mishandling of a firearm, and a high speed pursuit by J.E. Freeman, who brings a similar energy here as he did as the Dane in Miller’s Crossing. It is by far the weakest section of the film, mostly because Simon is an insufferable character.
The third and final story revolves around Adam and Zack, a pair of television actors and a closeted couple who have been coerced by Burke (William Fichtner), an LAPD narcotics officer, into setting up a sting on their dealer. It doesn’t matter to him if it’s Simon or Ronna, so long as he can get to their supplier Todd. This sting leads to something much stranger as the pair are invited to a Christmas dinner by Burke and his wife Irene (Jane Krakowski). At first it seems like they are swingers, but they are something much darker…
Go sets itself apart from the other post-Tarantino crime films of the decade mostly by its breeziness. The stakes, even when they have potentially lethal consequences, feel much lower than other films or than anything by Tarantino himself. Part of this is the rave subculture that serves as a backdrop for two of the stories, and part of it is due to the younger protagonists. It also helps that the cast are well suited to the film. Sarah Polley is probably a better writer and director than an actor, but she’s great as Ronna. William Fichtner is threatening, but more so from his eccentricities. And then there’s Timothy Olyphant, who became a star before our eyes playing the part of Todd Gaines. Who doesn’t love a drug dealer, shirtless and in a Santa hat, quoting The Breakfast Club with pure menace? Or for that matter, a drug dealer who hates The Family Circus, but reads it every day anyway. Is it contrived? Yeah, but who cares? So is everything else in this neon landscape.
oliveresque 