**½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Zooey Deschanel, Jena Malone, Judy Greer
written and directed by Martin Hynes
by Alex Jackson Two columns of note recently circulated in the blogosphere. The first was Richard Corliss's "The Trouble with Sundance," in which Corliss complains that Sundance movies have become formulaic and predictable, effectively snuffing out the fresh, original voices the festival was supposed to be cultivating. The second article was a partial rebuttal by David Bordwell that sheds light on the phenomenon of what he calls "Indie Guignol": independent filmmakers trying to outdo one another in sensationalistic brutality. Compared to entries in the "Sundance genre," i.e., films typically involving dysfunctional families that strive to reconnect, oftentimes through road trips (the Oscar-nominated Little Miss Sunshine would be considered prototypical), these pictures are not mainstream, but they're considered by critics to have more artistic merit. And yet, particularly because we can easily recognize the phenomenon, it's losing its legitimacy as art. "Very often the predictable nonconformist is just as orthodox as the conformist," Bordwell writes. I thought about this while watching Martin Hynes's The Go-Getter, a film that subtly breaks away from Indie Guignol by embracing the possibly more passé Sundance genre. After Fido, Teeth, We Are The Strange, Hounddog, Strange Culture, and Low and Behold, all decidedly non-commercial films that take lots of chances and fail miserably, I have to admit I was happy to see something that gave me a few simple guiltless pleasures. Yes, Sundance films have become their own genre, but what the fuck is wrong with genre, anyway? Are you really a movie lover if you can't enjoy a solid but generic horror film, war film, noir, romantic comedy, western, and/or musical?
Maybe if I were as sheltered as Corliss, I might rail against the Sundance genre as well, but I've seen the black abyss of bad committed art and the comparatively uncreative genre filmmaker is a valuable asset indeed. The Go-Getter is about a nineteen-year-old boy who missed a year of high school to take care of his dying mother. Feeling trapped and bored, he decides to steal a car and leave town, only later coming up with the mission to track down his estranged half-brother and tell him about Mom's passing. Meanwhile, he finds a cell phone in the car and remarkably begins to form a long-distance romantic relationship with the car's mysterious owner. The film has lots of simple little pleasures, like Byron Shah's sophisticated earth-tone cinematography and an impromptu re-enactment of the impromptu Madison bit from Godard's Bande à part. And though I've been known to buy into the whole "Indie Guignol" scene, I greatly appreciated a sequence set in a child pornography studio that rather hilariously satirizes the insufferable pretentiousness behind the movement. Meanwhile, the sex in the film is not quite explicit enough to be erotic, but it's fun: just a couple of fresh-faced kids getting under the covers and rolling around. No brutal rape, no humiliation, no degradation, nothing but good old-fashioned free love. The Go-Getter's weightless aestheticism is enough to shame even a hard-core Larry Clark devotee like myself.
