The Class of 1999: 'Go'
The adolescent's 'Pulp Fiction' launched a a whole lotta careers.
1999 was a historically-great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed Following; next up on the docket is Election. But first… it’s time for…
Go - directed by Doug Liman - written by John August - April 7, 1999
It would be mean, but not altogether unfair, to call Go “baby Pulp Fiction.” There had OF COURSE been other movies that showed the same events from multiple points of view before… but Go, like Pulp Fiction, is a segmented crime comedy in which the different episodes often overlap or take place simultaneously and not that much time is actually devoted to showing multiple perspectives of the same event. Go isn’t like Rashomon, where you’re trying to evaluate the truth based on different characters’ experiences/re-tellings of one particular happening; Go is like Pulp Fiction in that you see one side of a phone call in one chapter and then see the other side in different chapter. And if the opening monologue delivered by Katie Holmes at the beginning wasn’t influenced by Quentin Tarantino, then I’m the new CEO of Disney - said monologue is even delivered in a diner, just like the one Tim Roth gives at the start of Pulp Fiction (there are also multiple uses of the POV trunk shots which are famously a hallmark of Tarantino films).
Needless to say, Go isn’t as good as Pulp Fiction. Nobody writes characters the way Quentin Tarantino writes characters, and his mastery of non-linear structure is also nearly unrivaled. In fact, Pulp Fiction utilizes its jumbled timeline to explore heady topics about fate: for example, the iconic conversation between Vincent and Jules about providence is meaningful because we already know Vincent is days away from being shot to death, and that he would have avoided this fate if he had taken Jules’ perspective to heart. The blended chronology of Go, however, does not do a whole lot to bolster its primary themes.
Still, by any metric that isn’t comparing it to one of the greatest films ever made, Go is a total blast… and it would be unfair to say that the movie is completely lacking in profundity.
See, when I began this retrospective of films released in 1999, I thought the recurring theme that connected many of the movies was going to be anti-capitalist sentiment, as explicitly expressed in pictures like Fight Club, The Matrix, American Beauty, and Office Space. But it now seems to me that there’s an even more prevalent recurring theme in these films - specifically, issues of identity.
In the aforementioned The Matrix and Fight Club, as well as The Sixth Sense, characters’ reality is completely upended - they are literally not who they thought they were. The line between reality and fantasy is only slightly less-blurred for the characters in Galaxy Quest, in which aliens mistake the cast of a Star Trek-esque television program for actual intergalactic heroes. The protagonist of Boys Don’t Cry is trans, and forced to keep that fact a secret, lest he face persecution. Being John Malkovich is all about taking control of a different human being’s body, almost like a comedic Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of the pod people. Characters in Eyes Wide Shut, Audition, and Following all spend a large portion of their stories pretending to be someone or something they are not. Even the year’s big hit teen movies, like Cruel Intentions, 10 Things I Hate About You, and She’s All That, revolve around similar subterfuges and deceptions.
The same is true of Go: almost every major character uses a false identity at some point or another, and the various MacGuffins at play all either bolster these deceits or are, themselves, knock-offs of superior, legitimate items.
Go lays this theme out very plainly right from its opening scene, when a character played by Katie Holmes delivers this monologue to a mysterious off-screen figure whose identity isn’t revealed until much later in the movie:
“You know what I like about Christmas? The surprises. You get this box and you're sure of what's inside. You shake it, weigh it. You're convinced you have it pegged. No doubt in your mind. But then you open it and it's different. You know. Wow! Bang! Surprise! I mean, it's kind of like you and me here, you know? I'm not saying it's anything it's not. Come on, this time yesterday, who would've thunk it?”
A variation of the phrase “anything it’s not” is used again in the very next scene, when someone warns the Holmes character’s friend, Ronna (Sarah Polley), “Don’t think you’re something you’re not.”
Oh, and Holmes’ character, by the way, is called Claire, a name which means “clear,” natch. Unsurprisingly, Claire is one of the few honest people in the whole story.
The first chunk of Go centers around Ronna, a grocery store cashier on the verge of being evicted. Desperate for money, she agrees to work a shift for a co-worker, Simon (Desmond Askew), so he can go to Vegas with his buddies. Simon’s side hustle is dealing drugs, and while Ronna working his shift, two guys, Zack (Jay Mohr) and Adam (Scott Wolf) come in looking to buy ecstasy from her absent co-worker. So Ronna, seeing the possibility of another much-needed payday, goes to Simon’s supplier, Todd (Timothy Olyphant), and convinces him to give her the drugs to sell, leaving behind her friend Claire as collateral. But when she goes to Zack and Adam, they’re with a third guy, Burke (American goddamn treasure William Fichtner), and Ronna smells a set-up (correctly, as it turns out). So she dumps the drugs down the toilet and quickly makes her exit. But now she has to give Todd something to get Claire back, so she buys a bunch of over-the-counter stuff and passes it off as the ecstasy he gave her. Todd falls for it, so Ronna decides to pass off more of the OTC meds as ecstasy to dumb kids at a rave, which she does, ultimately netting more than enough money to prevent being kicked out of her apartment. Unfortunately, as she’s celebrating in the middle of the rave, Todd shows up, ‘cause he’s figured out he was duped. He chases her out into the parking lot and seems as though he’s about to shoot her when she’s the victim of an apparent hit-and-run.
The second chunk of Go follows Simon his trip to Vegas with his pals, Marcus (Taye Diggs), Tiny (Breckin Myer from Clueless), and Singh (‘90s indie stalwart James Duval). Todd has lent Simon use of his credit card because of his rewards program or some nonsense. Simon is an affable idiot and he basically stumbles through a series of wacky adventures, including crashing a wedding by posing as an invited guest. This culminates in a mishap at a strip club, which in turns leads to a shooting and a car chase. Simon and his friends ultimately make it out of town… without realizing that Simon left Todd’s credit card at the strip club, the owner of which (J.E. Freeman) is now hunting them.
The final storyline in Go fills us in on how Zack and Adam fit into all of this: they’re soap opera actors and a closeted couple who were busted by Burke, who’s a cop, and are now rolling over on Simon to save their own hides. They’re also the ones in the car that hits Ronna; they’ve come to the rave in search of a make-up artist with whom, they have come to realize, they’ve both been having affairs.
Ronna is pretending to be a drug dealer, complete with phony drugs… Simon is pretending to be Todd… and Zack and Adam are professional pretenders. And those are just the major examples of the ways in which chicanery plays into the narrative: Burke and his wife (Jane Krakowski!) actually want to lure Zack and Adam into their Amway-esque pyramid scheme (which includes pasting their own label over more reputable products), Marcus takes Tiny to task for claiming that his “mother’s mother’s mother was Black,” and there’s a running joke in which the denizens of Las Vegas keep mistaking Marcus for either a parking attendant or bathroom attendant.
And it’s this theme of people acting as characters they aren’t that gives the narrative meaning… even if it achieves this meaning in a manner to which audiences are accustomed.
In a 2019 retrospective interview, director/cinematographer Doug Liman - who had previously made Swingers - explained what he considers the story to be about:
“I had this belief that you have a get-out-of-jail-free card when you’re 18… What I saw in Go was a story that was celebrating: do crazy shit while you’re young. You can get away with it when you’re young.”
I’d argue that “getting away with it” is actually part and parcel with the process of self-discovery; young adults, like toddlers, are testing boundaries in order to get to the bottom of the question, “Who am I?” Go abstains from the kind of traditional character arcs that usually clue the viewer into the point of the story, which may make it seem, well, pointless. But it’s not: it’s acknowledging that growth - i.e., answering the question “Who am I?” - is an ongoing process. As August puts it: “Movies about this age are always like, ‘That’s the night that everything changed.’ I wanted to go against that trope.”
Go didn’t make money when it was first released - in fact, its soundtrack probably did better than the actual movie, thanks to its mix of ‘90s megastars (No Doubt, Fatboy Slim, Natalie Imbruglia, Air, etc.) and a pair of surprise hit singles: “Steal My Sunshine,” by Len, and a remix of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” by Philip Steir.
But Go’s failure at the box office doesn’t mean it’s quality went completely unrecognized.
Hollywood was smart enough to read the movie’s visual kineticism as a sign that Liman was capable of handling bigger productions, and he went on to helm two of the 21st century’s best action movies, The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow (as well as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which I don’t think is very good, but did make a ton of moolah).
Go was also the first produced screenplay by John August, who has since written some huge flicks (the 2000 Charlie’s Angels, the live-action Aladdin) and a whopping five films directed by Tim Burton (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, Frankenweenie, and Dark Shadows).
And the young cast - which also includes the brief, but extremely entertaining, film debut of a 27-year-old Melissa McCarthy - mostly went on to have great careers, too (mostly).
Of the bevy of notable films released in 1999, Go is probably one of the less celebrated. But the way it either launched or boosted a plethora of careers - to say nothing of the fact that it’s so incredibly entertaining - assures its place in the annals of cinematic history. Its cultural impact was never as explosive as that of The Matrix or Fight Club, but that doesn’t mean it failed to make a big ol’ crater.
Underrated Christmas movie.