Go-around

Much ado about nothing

by Peter Keough

GO, Directed by Doug Limon. Written by John August. With Sarah Polley, Jay Mohr, Desmond Askew, Jay Mohr, Scott Wolf, Katie Holmes, Nathan Bexton, Robert Peters, Timothy Olyphant, and William Fichtner. A Columbia Pictures release. At the Nickelodeon, the Harvard Square, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.

Pulp Fiction just won't go away. Independent filmmakers have long been imitating its style, and lately they've been trying to copy its structure. Playing by Heart, 200 Cigarettes, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels are just a few recent films that have adopted Pulp's scheme of multiple, intersecting plotlines -- none with much success. Go, the second film by Swingers director Doug Liman, comes closest to Tarantino's narrative sleight-of-hand, and it captures a lot of the fading auteur's hip, transgressive spirit. That and some crafty performances almost obscure the problem that Go is all verb and no subject.

It's Christmas Eve, and porcelain-pretty-but-tough-as-nails Ronna (Sarah Polley, who mercifully seems to be replacing Christina Ricci as the indie film queen) is an 18-year-old supermarket checkout clerk who needs rent money or she'll be evicted. So when Simon (a feral Desmond Askew), her obnoxious British co-worker, offers to pay her to take his shift so he can party in Vegas, she doesn't think twice. It's a pivotal moment, not necessarily in her life (these are not so much characters as blithely etched attitudes) but in the film's structure. The scene is repeated three times, each time introducing the same series of events from a different point of view.

The first go-round, from Ronna's perspective, takes shape when two charming strangers at her register, Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr, who's gone through this drill before in Playing and Cigarettes), try to score some ecstasy from her. It seems Simon is their usual supplier, and given her cash-flow problem, Ronna agrees to step in. A neophyte in this business, she enlists the help of two friends, the strait-laced Claire (Katie Holmes) and the drug-addled Mannie (Nathan Bexton), to pay a call on Todd (Timothy Olyphant), the local drug connection.

The situation rapidly deteriorates, since Claire has to serve as collateral while Ronna hustles the goods, and Mannie complicates matters by taking an overdose of the inventory. Ronna proves resourceful, though, getting suspicious when creepy Burke (William Fichtner) slithers onto the scene, and making some serious money on the side by selling cold medicine to clueless suburban teenagers at a rave.

Limon proves resourceful, too, in this journeyman effort (it's the first screenplay for John August, and it has that kind of glib urgency). Although Go is devoid of the dented romanticism and oddball ambiance of Swingers, Limon manages to inject it with irresistible energy and skewed wit. Some of that depends on gratuitously pyrotechnic camerawork and editing (it works better than it should, as in a sequence from Mannie's ecstatically impaired point of view involving a telepathic dialogue with a cat). But much of the film's success owes to the way Limon gets in tune with hyper-romanticism's glib counterpart, chic nihilism, and can evoke that pose's slick irony.

Go has been faulted for the superficial unpleasantness of its characters; as in Very Bad Things (which wasn't that bad), everyone is a creep or a fool, so why care? Perhaps because the characters in Go are more foolish than creepy -- and Limon's tone is more affectionate than condescending -- they seem tolerable company until the end of the ride. It helps that the performers seem to be having fun with the nonsense too, finding redeeming wryness and wrinkles in their limited roles.

As in the better films of the Coen brothers, though, it's the sadistic machinery of the film's thumbscrew plot that drives Go. When Ronna's segment is cut short (regrettably so), the story rewinds to allow Simon his chance to indulge in his folly -- a casino and lap-dancing debauch with his buddies that dissipates the camaraderie of Swingers with handguns, food poisoning, vendettas, and general, gross-out anarchy. And Adam and Zack get theirs in a behind-the-scenes recap involving hidden wires, Amway products, and a yellow Miata. To its credit, this concluding segment actually touches on issues of conscience, culpability, and compassion.

Not that they amount to much -- the point of a film like this is how cleverly loose ends can cancel out so it all amounts to nothing. Aside from a few cuts and bruises and a few extra bucks, the payoff is a little adrenaline and the satisfaction of a formal exercise well done. Limon shows that he's got style and intelligence, but without the passion he showed in Swingers, he's all dressed up with nowhere to go.