NICK OFFERMAN THE GO GETTERS MOVIE MOVIE

Rather, she’s curious, probing and intriguingly enigmatic. Mercer is scarcely out of town when the cell phone in the car rings and he’s talking to the car’s owner, a young female who, surprisingly, is not furious or threatening to call the police. Arlen doesn’t even know that his mother has died. Stealing a Volvo station wagon from a car wash, 19-year-old Mercer (Lou Taylor Pucci) leaves Eugene, Ore., to track down his errant older half-brother Arlen (Jsu Garcia), whom Mercer hasn’t seen in 14 years. In The Go-Getter, filmmaking itself feels like Manifest Destiny.Hynes, who made one previous indie feature, “The Big Split,” turns what sounds like a contrived idea into an unusual vehicle (literally) for two people to become intrigued with one another. This one is alive with discoveries-of locations, characters, the actors who embody them, and even the medium. On some road movies, the director has worked everything out in advance: You can almost see the final destination before you get there. Ward: The two met on the film and joined forces on one of the year’s musical delights, She & Him: Volume One. And then there’s the serendipitous pairing of Deschanel’s voice and the soundtrack by M.

Hynes throws things out, and some of them clunk: the too-arty opening an easy gay joke a song-and-dance interlude. (As this sultry flake with a maternal streak, Tierney is a revelation. Hynes has cast him opposite some of the American indie cinema’s biggest female cuties-not just the irresistible Deschanel but Judy Greer as a hippie-dippie potter, Jena Malone as a teen sexpot with long legs and a dark underbelly, and Maura Tierney as a free-spirited pet-store owner with a terrible band that performs as a condition of parole. You don’t see him acting-only reacting, thinking, picking himself up after various batterings and shambling on. He’s a kid with his own morbid sense of humor (he tells people his mother is on an Australian walkabout), and Lou Taylor Pucci has loopy rhythms all his own. Happily, Mercer is not an I-am-a-camera blank slate. (In the age of Napoleon Dynamite, “quirky” lines recur in indie movies like hiccups.) The weirdness goes deep. Hynes has a talent for deadpan jaw-droppers that aren’t self-consciously quirky. A liquor salesman in a ten-gallon hat (Bill Duke) shares his thoughts on Americans’ pathetic inability to protect themselves by any means but guns. I still love everybody except that fuckass Arlen.”) An existentialist child pornographer (Julio Oscar Mechoso) credits Arlen for knowing just what he should do to give his existence meaning. A potter Arlen robbed (Nick Offerman, who has three entertaining roles) socks Mercer on the jaw, then shares his marijuana pipe. But there’s opening up and opening up, up, and away. to Mexico, and the people he meets-in the best road-movie tradition-open up to him. So Mercer keeps driving south, from the Mojave to L.A. Mercer’s half-brother, Arlen (Jsu Garcia), was a bounder who left a trail of pissed-off people.

NICK OFFERMAN THE GO GETTERS MOVIE MOVIE

In The Go-Getter, moments come one after another even in motion, the movie is grounded. In his road picture Into the Wild, Sean Penn went in for fancy montage and never settled into the moment. The simple, handmade vision fits her voice, and fits the movie, too. In one conversation, she’s in the backseat, turning on and off a strap-on doctor’s light on her head. She wonders what it would be like if we could understand dogs and cats: “What if they were just as disappointing as humans and they thought about nothing?” Mercer imagines what she looks like he tries on different faces-white, black, Asian-as she speaks. The fun part is that the owner of the car left her cell phone in it, knows who he is (how? A mystery), and keeps calling for late-night bull sessions.Įven more fun, the voice belongs to Zooey Deschanel, which means it’s among the most charming in movies (and, now, music): sardonic yet hopeful, throaty, yet with a girlish tinkle. Hynes follows 19-year-old Mercer White (Lou Taylor Pucci), who steals a car in his hometown of Eugene, Oregon, to track down his estranged, much older half-brother and let him know their mom died: a melancholy setup. Martin Hynes’s first film, The Go-Getter, is an especially wonderful addition to the genre, with the right-flickering-mixture of loneliness and enchantment, and with jokes that come at you from just around the bend. Zarkov taking a rocket ship to the planet Mongo. Part travelogue, part search for the self, the road movie-like its literary cousin, the on-the-road memoir -is a distinctly American genre, and we should enjoy good new specimens while we can, before the escalating price of gas means the notion of non-rich people driving cross-country has all the verisimilitude of Flash Gordon and Dr.

Nick offerman the go getters movie