Cynical Cinema

The Go-Getter is a lot like other road movies.  The recent movie I thought of when I watched this film was Into The Wild.  And while The Go-Getter doesn’t quite reach the lyrical heights and literary feel of Into The Wild, it is similar in many ways.  First of all, they both star Jena Malone.  Only in this film, she plays a much different character.  A wild, mean-spirited seductress who wraps young Lou Taylor Pucci in a web of deceit and pain.  However, that is merely a small part of this terrific movie, and I should probably start at the beginning.

Pucci plays Mercer, a young man whose reaction to his mother’s death is to steal a car and try to find his brother to break the news.  Basically a good kid, he has never done anything like this before.  While making his getaway in the stolen car, a cell phone rings.  On the other end of the line is Kate (Zooey Deschanel), the owner of the car.  Bizarrely, they strike up a friendship over the phone as he drives around America in search of a brother he knows nothing about.  As in other movies, like Into The Wild, he meets up with a strange assortment of characters, among them the smoking hot Jena Malone.  After they hook up, he finally sees her true colours, and so begins his coming-of-age story.

Traveling throughout the country, searching for his brother, he gets older and wiser each time he meets a new group of people.  And he develops more and more of a bond with the girl on the other end of the cell phone.  At a certain point, the abundance of quirky characters and strange dialogue becomes almost overwhelming and cheesy, but that doesn’t really slow down the momentum of the movie.  While we might get tired of the strange people and the odd situations piling up one on top of the other, we never get tired of the bittersweet conversations between Pucci and Deschanel. 

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this movie is that while the quirkiness reaches a point where it verges on cheesy, other elements do not.  Is there anything cheesier in a movie than a dream sequence?  I would suggest not.  And yet, in The Go-Getter, there are multiple dream sequences.  Dreams at night while Mercer is asleep, daydreams while he talks to Kate while he’s awake, and strange sequences abound.  But they actually move the movie along, and each one individually is a wonderful little set-piece. 

The Go-Getter is a lovely, romantic, bittersweet indie movie that is more effective than any Hollywood big-budget romance in recent years.  It came out September 16th, from Peace Arch Entertainment.  Pick it up.

I have watched a lot of movies in my time. 400 or so of those movies are reviewed here on this website. But prior to starting this website, I would venture a guess and say I have seen about five thousand movies, maybe more. Because I am really lame and have no life. And of all those movies, I can honestly say that I have rarely been as charmed with a movie as I am with Son of Rambow. Paramount Home Entertainment releases this gem on Tuesday, August 26th, and I highly recommend picking it up right away. There is no word I can use to describe this movie other than “charming”. A word that could be considered one that indicates faint praise. Like, “oh, that movie was so cute and charming, too bad it involved Meg Ryan and sucked”. But I mean it in a way that conveys the highest praise.

Son Of Rambow is not a great movie. It is not a perfect movie or even an extraordinarily well-crafted movie. But those are merely benchmarks that many movie critics use to give a final rating. Like a judge in Olympic gymnastics. Oh, there’s an awkward cut at the end of the scene. Minus one star. There’s a slight hop at the end of the dismount. Minus one point. What movies aim to do is create a certain emotion, and the technical aspects of a movie can sometimes be totally irrelevant. And Son Of Rambow is one of those movies. Not that it’s ham-handed or poorly directed or anything. But it’s charm comes from elsewhere. What makes the film so wonderful is that the charm is, or at least seems to be, completely effortless. It’s that effortlessness that makes great movies. E.T., The Goonies, and a very few others have managed to do the same.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young boy, about nine or ten years old, being raised by a single mother in some kind of religious cult. When you go to school, you have to wait outside the classroom whenever the class is watching a movie or something on TV, because your religion forbids it. You have no friends, because making friends with anyone the cult does not approve is forbidden. You have a vivid imagination, and you express this incredible imagination through drawing - on your schoolbooks, your locker, the bathroom stalls at school, anything you can get your hands on. And then, through a series of bizarre circumstances, you end up seeing the only thing you have ever seen, on television or in movies. And it’s First Blood. Seriously, stop and think about that for a moment. When I was very young, about five years old, I saw television for the first time ever. I watched a Raggedy Ann cartoon at, I believe, Megan McLeod’s birthday party. And it affected me. In point of fact, it scared the living hell out of me. I had nightmares for weeks. About Raggedy Ann. Imagine seeing Rambo in that situation.

Now, the only window you have into the world beyond your own is RAMBO. And the only boy willing to talk to you at school is making a movie. You know this boy because every time you’re out in the hall when the class is watching TV, he’s out in the hall because he’s been kicked out of his own class. And now, you are obsessed with Rambo, and you get to play the Son Of Rambo in his movie. The world is opening up to you! In fact, this other boy is so impressed with your drawings that he’s making YOUR movie. When young Will turns to young Lee Carter and says “this is the happiest day of my entire life”, you can’t question the statement for even a second. It’s stating the obvious. Of COURSE this is the happiest day of his life. And we, the audience, are absolutely thrilled for him.

The best thing about this movie are the two young leads. Will Poulter plays Lee Carter, the bad kid in school, a kid who lives alone with his abusive jerk of an older brother because his mom is gallivanting around Europe with some guy. He steals, he wrecks stuff, he tells teachers off, simply because there is no one at home to actually discipline him. So why wouldn’t he? Poulter is fantastic in the role, but it is Bill Milner who turns this film into something great. As Will Proudfoot, the young man under the thumb of this bizarre religious cult, he is pure innocence personified, completely guileless, and so powerfully enthusiastic about this project and his new friend that we are totally sucked in.

The two young men, initially brought together in a sort of friendship-of-convenience, soon become really good friends. As the only two who know about their film project, they become extremely close. Will is sneaking out of his house and plotting convoluted ways to spend time with Lee Carter to make the movie. Lee Carter is sneaking the video camera away from his brother and trying to make him happy while running around with Will. But of course, something has to go wrong in the film, as with any film. And a new kid at school (the Coolest Kid In School) changes the dynamic of their friendship. Lee Carter, more world-wise than Will, sees the new kid for what he is - an irritating poser. But Will, still so amazed by everything in the world around him, can’t understand Lee Carter’s reluctance to involve the new kid, Didier, in the movie.

Of course, their friendship suffers a major setback, and I don’t think it’s giving too much away to tell you that they end up reconciling. But it’s not the end of the movie that matters. It’s the journey that’s amazing. Watching these two kids together is magical. Watching Will perform the stunts that will make up the bulk of their movie is absolutely hilarious. (Especially the one where he jumps out of the tree with the umbrella.) And seeing these kids come of age together merits just one description. Absolutely charming. This is one of the most feel-good movies in years.

Anton Yelchin is very good in Charlie Bartlett.  As the title character, and therefore star of the picture, he holds together a movie that really does not hold up on it’s own.  The movie opens with him being expelled from yet another private school, this time for laminating licenses illegally, and being taken home by his mom in a limo.  His family is fabulously wealthy, and he lives in a massive home with extremely fancy cars.  As Charlie says later, to his psychiatrist, “my family has a psychiatrist on call - how normal can I be?”  And that psychiatrist will figure prominently, albeit in a tangential way, throughout the rest of the movie.

Charlie is now forced to attend public school for the first time, and with his suit and tie and crest on his jacket, he immediately runs afoul of the school’s cartoon bully, played by Tyler Hilton.  However, he soon discovers that the medication his psychiatrist has prescribed for him, while it doesn’t do what it’s intended to do, is in high demand.  He figures he could hook up with this bully (the school drug dealer) in order to make some money and, by extension, some friends.  Clearly Charlie Bartlett doesn’t need money.  But he does need friends, and illegal enterprise has proven, we assume, thoughout his life, to provide him with those friends.

This is a venue that is never fully explored - how Charlie Bartlett is either a kid trying to make his way through the perils of “popularity” in high school, or perhaps he is a kid who is just smarter and wiser than all the other kids.  Toward the end of the film, that discrepancy is addressed, but in a fairly lame, conventional and unsatisfying way.  Robert Downey Jr. is underused as the school principal, who is a well-intentioned drunk whose life is falling apart.  He’s great in the role, his downward spiral coinciding almost exactly with Charlie Bartlett’s upward turn.  Which leads to, of course, a substantial confrontation between the two.  But again, Downey’s transformation is never fully explored, and is equally unsatisfying.

Really, this movie is very good until the midway point, as Charlie Bartlett becomes the coolest kid in school - providing psychiatric drugs and informal bathroom-stall counselling to his fellow high schoolers.  But the second half is so chaotic, and makes so little sense in spots, that it feels merely like a series of events that have little relation to each other.  And when the movie finally grinds to an end, the only word I can think of to use is “unsatisfying”.  The premise is good - the execution is flawed - and the finale is unsatisfying, at best.