Some Drivel On...Go

“Go” might well have had no grand ambition other than to be a rollicking good time, but released as it was six months before the turn of the century, it has in the years since emerged as something like a summation of the 90s. It begins with supermarket checkout clerk Ronna (Sarah Polley) querying of a patron “Paper or plastic?” in a disgruntled tone of voice and repeating it when she doesn’t get an answer, not so much burned out as just pissed off, in general. She’s a disaffected Gen Xer, in other words, and destined to end up like her customer (“Don’t think you’re something you’re not – I used to have your job”), until Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) come through her line looking to score drugs since the guy, Simon (Desmond Askew), whose shift Ronna took and normally sells them their stuff has gone off to Vegas with his mates instead. She decides to improvise as a drug dealer so she can make rent, essentially spinning Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” off into Quentin Tarantino territory, the two dueling American indie archetypes of the period sort of converging as Doug Liman’s comedy thriller becomes a triptych with three storylines about all these people and a few more bouncing off each other and resolving in, well, no grand resolution at all beyond one character wondering what they are doing for New Year’s Eve. Call it a Gen X styed elixir to all that Y2K anxiety; take a chill pill, man. 

For as much as “Go” can’t help but come across as Pepsi to its forebear “Pulp Fiction’s” Coke, however, Liman manages to inject enough verve to keep it feeling fresh if not even occasionally original. True, his documented DIY approach can’t quite save the Vegas sequence, all of which still feels as if it’s following a screenwriting treasure map than just getting made up by the characters on the spot, but there all manner of flourishes that elevate the overall movie, nevertheless. You see it almost right from the start, something akin to a point-of-view shot of Ronna watching various grocery store items circle the checkout conveyor belt toward her, the humdrum realities of low wage work, while the close-ups of William Fichtner as the undercover cop trying to bust Ronna for dealing are genuinely hilarious, cutting straight to his whole uncomfortably off-kilter character and performance. The crucial flaw to “Go,” however, proves to paradoxically be its single best element: Sarah Polley. She’s too good! She grounds the proceedings in such a surprisingly real way that when she is ushered off screen a third way of the way through, clearing room for the other two stories, the seesaw goes so far in the other direction that an affecting black comedy becomes a violent cartoon.