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One of the more eagerly anticipated sophomore directoral efforts lately, besides the Wachowski brothers’ amazing The Matrix (which appears on its way to a couple sequels), is Go, the second film from Swingers’ Doug Liman. Two years after helping jumpstart Big Bad Voodoo Daddy et al and making “money” an adjective, he spins an energetic, blackly humorous tale of White Christmas...as in, happy white pills, have yourself a merry little X(tasy)mas.
Told from three different viewpoints in succession, Go starts with Ronna (Uma Thurman lookalike Sarah Polley, from The Sweet Hereafter -- young actresses who resemble successful, somewhat-less-young, actresses seems to be this week’s thread), a haggard supermarket checker who, anxious to avoid getting evicted and spending the holidays in her car, ventures, just this once, “moving up the drug food-chain.” After a couple mid-level TV actors (Jay Mohr and “Party of Five’s” Scott Wolf) wander through her line looking to score from Ronna’s buddy Simon, she decides to take advantage of his absence, and a night when everybody’s seeking a little something extra for a Christmas Eve rave, and do the deal herself. Spectacularly uninitiated in the finer points of sub rosa pharmaceutical traffic, Ronna ends up leaving her friend Claire (“D. Creek”-er Katie Holmes) as collateral with wholesale dealer Todd (Timothy Olyphant, from Scream 2), stumbling into a sting, selling chewable aspirin to high-school kids, and swirling ever deeper into the abyss.
Jump to Simon (Desmond Askew), who facilitated all this by taking a day off to hit Vegas with three friends and Todd’s credit card. He loses his money, wanders into a wedding, shags the bridesmaids, torches a hotel room, and winds up, along with traveling companion Marcus (Taye Diggs, who helped Stella rediscover her groove), fleeing for his life from angry bouncers at a lap-dance joint.
Rewind to Adam and Zack (Wolf and Mohr), the gay actor/lovers whose chemical indiscretion and craving for orange juice really started everything. We get a look, from different angles, at their interactions with Ronna, variously desperate, compassionate, and desperate again, in which the significance of the film’s title finally becomes apparent. Somewhere in there they have an unfathomably uncomfortable Christmas Eve dinner with another couple, some very nervy cops (excellent unsung C-list actor William Fichtner, and “Ally McBeal’s” zoftig Jane Krakowski) with even more sinister motivation than a suspected allusion to the title of Liman’s first movie. The plots finally intersect again in one of the neater wrap-ups (screenplay by talented fledgling writer John August), which goes most of the way toward redirecting the discomfort from the evening’s mayhem.
At one point, Go appears poised to self-destruct, like a car at a railroad crossing trying to outrun the train. Most of its initial humor is of the voyeuristic sort usually seen in high school (another thread for the week), where a certain subgroup seems good for little else than entertaining the masses with mind-altered stupidity: “Hey, man, remember that time you got wasted in fifth period shop and tried to make a bong out of Jimmy’s carburetor, but there was still some gas in the float bowl, so the drill press burst into flames, setting off the sprinkler system, etc.” Fortunately, just when you might start to suspect Liman’s accomplishment with Swingers was a fluke, the characters begin looking a little more human, although in this story nobody’s innocent; some are simply a little less guilty, and stupid, than others. Liman wields the multiple deja view perspectives, a la Tarantino (although Q.T. was hardly the first; that device has been around at least since the New Testament offered four parallel versions of the same story), quite well, though. He even throws in a neat action sequence, a car chase built less on high-speed stunting than the ineptitude of the pursued.
However -- Go provided me with one glaring unintentional flinch. When one character -- and giving too much away would spoil the film’s best feature, its ending -- suffers some extremely painful bodily misadventure, involving bloody strands of hair stuck in a windshield wiper, a large portion of the audience thought it was pretty funny.
But then, they were probably the sort who encouraged their drunken friends to try and beat the train. B
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