[COLUMN] 25 Years Ago, Go Tapped Into the Listlessness at the End of History | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Hey there! 1999 was arguably one of the greatest years in the history of the cinema. We’re running a series of retro articles looking at the movies of the year with 25 years of distance, coinciding with the anniversaries of their original release dates. This one is a little late.

There’s an understandable urge to celebrate and valorize the biggest movies of 1999. It can, after all, make a credible claim to be the “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.” Such discussions are inevitably drawn to the biggest and most successful movies of the year, the ones that cast the longest cultural shadows: The Blair Witch Project, Office Space, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense. However, the beauty of 1999 is that even the smaller movies of the year frequently merit discussion, such as Doug Liman’s Go.

Go was a moderate success on its initial release. It earned $28.5m on a $20m budget and was broadly warmly received. It was not a runaway hit, and while the movie’s reputation has certainly grown in the years since its original release, earning rave retrospectives from critics like Matt Zoller Seitz and fond features by writers like Eric Ducker, it is hardly part of the cult canon of 1999. In the context of that year’s all-timer release calendar, Go is a relatively deep cut.

To be fair, it’s easy to understand why Go never became a truly breakout hit. Even the film’s favorable reviews inevitably compared to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, another sugar-rush ensemble film set amid the seedy underworld of 1990s Los Angeles. Leonard Maltin complained that it was “too much like a junior Pulp Fiction.” Roger Ebert acknowledged that the film “takes place entirely in Tarantino-land.” Janet Maslin called it “Pulp Fiction, with drugs, energy, and attitude.”

This is not unfair. Pulp Fiction casts an incredibly long shadow. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1994, and is generally considered to be one of the best films ever to lose the Best Picture race. Tarantino is one of the defining artists of his generation, and Pulp Fiction left a real imprint on the culture that inspired a wave of imitators and copycats from Two Days in the Valley to Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead to Suicide Kings.

Go is certainly superficially similar to Pulp Fiction. The film is structured as three interlocking stories about lives that intersect and overlap over the course of a single day in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. There’s an irreverence to both films, which feature drug dealers and excessive violence, driven by a dark sense of humor and a large ensemble of character actors. The characters’ lives collide in unexpected and unanticipated ways over the course of the film.

However, it’s worth situating Pulp Fiction and Go in a larger context of this sort of fractured ensemble storytelling. To a certain extent, there have always been stories like this, dating back to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance or Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel. There was a wave of these movies during the 1970s, as it became the default mode of disaster films like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno. Characters would live their lives, becoming entangled in some grand catastrophe.

Still, allowing for these earlier examples, Robert Altman would become a pioneer of the modern iteration of the form with Nashville in 1975, a movie following various characters over the five days leading up to a gala concert in Nashville, Tennessee. Altman’s concept was so radical and so unconventional that the term “Altmanesque” entered the cinephile’s vernacular to describe it. His collaborator Garry Trudeau would define it as “a kind of visual jazz.”

This approach to filmmaking eschews traditional story structures, abandoning the idea of a single protagonist or overarching narrative in favor of a sort of formal anarchy. Characters’ lives frequently overlap or intersect in ways that are mysterious to them, and only really comprehensible thanks to the viewer’s omniscient perspective on events. Indeed, later examples of the form disorient the audience by shifting back and forth through time, blurring that idea of cause and effect.

The genre broke out during the early 1990s, including Altman’s Short Cuts and Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon, both of which predate Pulp Fiction. However, the genre became much more ubiquitous towards the turn of the millennium. There were international examples, like Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and Alejandro Iñárritu’s Amores Perros. There were thrillers like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and even romantic comedies like Richard Curtis’ Love Actually.

However, the genre was particularly associated with Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium. Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart released in December 1998. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia came out in December 1999. Paul Haggis’ Crash would infamously win the Best Picture Oscar in  March 2005. There is a reason that Hsuan L. Hsu describes the genre as “the L.A. ensemble film”, despite all the examples outside the city.

Key to these movies is a sense of existential disconnect, the fear that life is fundamentally random, and that all human connection is just the product of luck rather than grand design. Go takes place at Christmas, a traditional time of togetherness, but the characters are scattered and fractured over the course of the movie. Indeed, the film is structured in such a way as to delay the revelation of several of its points of intersection in order to underscore this sense of chaos.

In the opening scene, Claire (Katie Holmes) eats breakfast with a mysterious stranger. “I mean, it’s kind of like you and me here, you know?” she muses. “Come on, this time yesterday, who would've thunk it?” It isn’t until an hour later that her companion is revealed to be the drug dealer Todd (Timothy Olyphant). At the climax of her story, Ronna (Sarah Polley) is hit by a yellow car. The film waits an hour to reveal that the drivers are actors Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr).

The characters in Go crave intimacy and connection. High on ecstasy, Manny (Nathan Bexton) imagines dancing through the aisles of a supermarket with a staff member (Rita Bland). Cop couple Burke (William Fichtner) and Irene (Jane Krakowski) are working Christmas, so have Christmas dinner together early, with Burke bringing Adam and Zack along to keep them company. Marcus (Taye Diggs) raves to his friends about the power of Tantric sex. The movie builds to a climactic rave at a sex shop.

However, that intimacy is often fake or thwarted. Zack and Adam are a gay couple, but their Hollywood stardom means that they’re closeted. It initially appears that Burke brought Zack and Adam back to his home so that he and Irene could swing, but that is not the case. Tiny (Breckin Meyer) tries to impress his friends with a story of his sexual conquests, only for Marcus to reveal that Tiny has actually stolen his story. Characters are trying to connect, but are ultimately distant.

This taps into an anxiety that simmers through the culture at the turn of the millennium. There is a sense of disconnect from the larger community and from one another. Sociologist Robert Puttnam would explore this decline of American shared community in Bowling Alone, which he published as an article in January 1995 and expanded into a book in 2000. Go taps into that basic idea, the sense that these characters are all just bouncing through the same space, randomly colliding.

In some ways, this is fear particularly suited to Los Angeles. The city is an urban sprawl, defined by its “grotesque size and dizzying variety of form.” It is paradoxically overcrowded and difficult to navigate without a car. It is not as concentrated as cities like New York. Human connection seems less organic and inevitable. However, the disconnect gets something more abstract, with David Fine arguing that California represents “the final destination of five hundred years of European westward movement.”

This gets at the larger cultural moment. The 1990s marked the end of the Cold War, what Charles Krauthammer called “the unipolar moment” and what Francis Fukuyama described as “the end of history.” The overarching framework that had defined postwar America was no longer present. A younger generation was growing up without the ordering principle of an ideological conflict against communism to provide a greater sense of purpose. Something had ended, but nothing had started.

As a result, existential uncertainty began to creep its way into the popular consciousness. This sense of listlessness and disillusionment manifested in a variety of ways, from the challenges to the very notion of a shared consensus reality in movies like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix to the quarter-life frustrations of movies like Office Space. Watching the movies from the 1990s, particularly the second half of the decade, there’s a real sense of “… is this all there is?”

Go suggests that this disconnect is rooted in the structures of contemporary capitalism. The movie’s three stories all begin at a large supermarket. Many of the film’s communal spaces are inherently transactional, such as the casino floor and later the strip club visited by Marcus and Simon (Desmond Askew). Indeed, Burke’s “ulterior motive” for inviting Zack and Adam to Christmas dinner is to convince them to join a pyramid scheme selling “Confederated Products.”

Go taps into a genuinely sense of millennial malaise, the fear that modern life really has no guiding arc or purpose, but is instead a set of completely arbitrary intersections over which nobody can exert any meaningful control. It’s to the credit of writer John August, director Doug Liman and an incredibly talented ensemble that the film maintains a warm humanist tone even as its characters ricochet through the film. Go loves its characters, even as they try to discern signal-from-noise.

Indeed, that disconnect arguably wouldn’t last. Many of the post-9/11 examples of this sort of ensemble film tend to argue for some greater meaning or purpose to these lives in collision. Crash is an obvious example, but it’s telling that Love, Actually spawned an entire subgenre of holiday-themed ensemble romantic comedies like Valentine's Day, New Years Eve, and Mothers Day, in which the disconnected ensemble eventually organizes itself into neatly defined couples.

Go speaks to a very different sensibility. The film has been somewhat overshadowed by the bigger and more successful movies of the year, and that’s understandable. However, it captures something that feels very firmly tied to its particular moment. It’s a quintessential 1999 movie.