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.

It was the mother of Jesse James, in real life, who would select the words for his epitaph. “In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here”. The new movie, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, feels that Robert Ford’s name IS worthy to appear in their title alongside that of James. That the two men were equally important parts to the same story. It’s a story that has been told many times, in books, music, and of course movies. Jesse James has been played by Tyrone Power, Red Barry, Roy Rogers, Clayton Moore, Audie Murphy, Robert Wagner, Robert Duvall, Kris Kristofferson and Rob Lowe. Among others. The worst portrayal of James was Colin Farrell’s in American Outlaws - mostly because that movie was so very very terrible. The best may well be Brad Pitt in this film. Whose title I won’t keep typing for fear of developing carpal tunnel syndrome.

But Brad Pitt is outdone considerably in this movie by Casey Affleck. Yes, Casey Affleck, the kid brother of Ben, who has never appeared in any significant role in his life and yet all of a sudden finds himself in two of the biggest roles in two of the best movies of the year! And he is good. In both - it isn’t just his brother’s direction that makes him great, he is just legitimately an excellent actor. Robert Ford has been played by John Carradine, whose four sons became actors. Son David was later killed by Uma Thurman. He has also been played by John Ireland, and some guy on an episode of Little House on the Prairie. But the best protrayal is without a doubt Affleck’s in this movie, and he richly deserved his Academy Award nomination as best supporting actor. Although Brad Pitt is a Movie Star, and his public persona dwarfs his talent, people forget that he is an outstanding actor. Outdoing him in a movie is a considerable achievement.

Pitt at his very best reminds me a little of Paul Newman, and watching this movie reminded me of Paul Newman’s portrayal of Billy The Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958). He’s an outlaw on the edge of sanity, paranoid and almost childish in his outlook. He seems to be the kind of guy who has reached the end of his rope, and almost welcomes his own death. Death is his deliverance, and I think the title of the movie makes it pretty clear it happens, and as such this is not much of a spoiler. Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel, Mary-Louise Parker, and Sam Shephard are all excellent in supporting roles, and James Carville makes a bizarre appearance as the governor. Nick Cave shows up as a saloon singer, and Hugh Ross lends just the right tone to keep the story moving as the narrator.

Jesse James, in his day, was about the most famous person in America, outside the president, because his exploits were followed in the papers. He was a celebrity simply because he was someone that people had heard of, and there were not many of those around at the time. Even at the time, he was considered a hero in the west, because the papers protrayed him as an anti-establishment fighter on the side of good. But of course, he was really just a bandit and a murderer who happened to get good press. Che Guevara he was not. This movie captures the tone perfectly, Robert Ford being an idol-worshipping sycophant to James and his gang at first. He has been a die-hard Jesse James fan since he was a small boy, and now that he comes face to face with the reality of the outlaw, he becomes completely torn between his hero-worship and his desire for self-preservation. And the film has a surprisingly un-dramatic conclusion, given the subject matter contained so succinctly in the title. Like the best westerns of all time (and this is among the top 200 ever made) death is just something that happens as a natural course of living, whether it be because of the elements, sickness, or at the hand of other men.

Westerns have gone through many ups and downs in movie history. John Ford’s Stagecoach, in 1939, was the first movie to suggest that westerns could be real feature films, A-list movies, rather than continuing as it was in B-movie, black-and-white serials and the like. That was the golden age of the western, when John Wayne and John Ford were kings, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart were major stars, and films like The Searchers, High Noon, Shane, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were among some of the best ever made. There was a big resurgence in the western genre during the 70s, when the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood breathed some life back into the genre. Then it died again, until the 90s, when Unforgiven in 1992 became one of the greatest movies of all time, and quite possibly the best western. This resurgence led mostly to B-grade fluff, like Bad Girls and The Quick And The Dead, and nothing of substance. I sincerely hope now that films like 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford mark a more substantial return to significance in the history of the western, and that more movies like this one can be made. But even if not, the fact that this particular movie was made is reason enough to be happy.