Go! Go! Go! Merry Christmas – The Cinematic Gifts of Doug Liman and His Unheralded Holiday Classic
Sony Pictures ReleasingWhere would the entertainment world be without Doug Liman? Not to play ‘What-If Building Blocks’ with the last quarter-century of Hollywood history, but there’s certainly an alternate universe where today’s movie industry looks different without Doug Liman’s contributions. Firstly, his sophomore film Swingers was a collaboration with Jon Favreau. While Liman himself was learning the ropes as a director, he was also sponsoring Favreau’s creativity machine who was producing, writing, and developing his special skill of connecting 1990s independent-film-comedy with the mainstream. Swingers, after all, was Favreau’s first produced script. Without Liman’s behind-the-scenes work and counsel on Swingers, how long does Favreau take to figure out how to humanise and humourise bigger-budget films for the masses. Without Favreau, after all, the MCU arguably never gets off on the right foot tonally or financially – regardless of one’s opinion of it today – the Disney animated remakes trend probably fizzles out sooner, and the Star Wars franchise possibly abandons – or rethinks, at least – the notion of related streaming series. That’s a lot to say about Favreau, but, you know, he started behind the scenes collaborating with Doug Liman, himself a steward of 1990s indie-cinema.
Also, when you go back to 1990s’ Hollywood investment strategies, studios were clearly looking to move on from bland sequels and Grisham novels to find the next ‘big thing’. Brand-building and world-building hadn’t quite been mastered yet – Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter would see to that. So in the early 2000s, two other blockbuster filmmaking trends emerged from studio projects not containing an orc, droid, or wizard. Firstly, complicated CGI-immersion into storytelling with projects like the Pixar films, the Matrix series, and Transformers cacophonies. But secondly, storytellers began visualising their larger-than-life cinematic worlds with exceptional filmed realism, which was a natural extension to the boon in small, intimate, indie filmmaking of the 1990s. A sense of realism washed over cinematic hyperbole. Batman Begins grounded Gotham in a naturalistic realm. Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt suddenly seemed to be operating in a post-9/11 world not unlike our own. Even the MCU got off on the realism-foot with Iron Man, arguably one of that universe’s most grounded films. But before all of these came Doug Liman’s surprise 2002 blockbuster, The Bourne Identity, which used muted natural lighting and intimate, immediate handheld camerawork to film an ordinary-looking dude on a globe-trotting, big-concept, spy adventure. It’s as if Liman borrowed the gritty, personal aesthetic of Homicide: Life on the Streets for use on the big screen. Jason Bourne realistically dealt with injury and self-discovery in a new and internalised way – you know, ‘new’ for a summer blockbuster. He didn’t quip one-liners, and Matt Damon was seldom replaced with a stuntman during action scenes. It’s a style and aesthetic that’s persevered over the past two decades and not just within action. Horror, too, has had a de-camping in its style, leaning toward more authentic and real-world genuineness in efforts to evoke more empathy and bigger scares. The Conjuring series and the found-footage sub-genre, for example, rely on a shorter distance between reality and fiction in order to manufacture audience connection. And Liman was one of the style’s vanguards – in Hollywood, at least.
All of this is to say that Doug Liman is often forgotten in discussions surrounding his significant Hollywood influence. It’s easy to shrug off his occasional underwhelming efforts (Fair Game, American Made) and whatever duress his creativity may have suffered during Covid (the poorly reviewed Locked Down and Chaos Walking), but he still manages to pull off fantastic films of varying scope somewhat regularly (Edge of Tomorrow, The Wall) while avoiding the worlds of big-brand IPs and superheroes, where his skills would assuredly be an asset. The best of his filmography is arguably the 1999 recreational-drug-use, adrenaholic holiday classic, Go. It’s a forgotten gem that actually ticks a lot of the Christmas-movie boxes, while few seem to have noticed. Granted, its well-earned R-rating limits its playability in the background of living room scenes as families decorate trees and sip hot chocolate. However, for the edgy, counter-culture film-viewer – the one who likes to dip into titles such as Bad Santa or Black Christmas – might I suggest Go with its interlacing small-time crime narratives, unapologetically 90s-arthouse flavour, fleshed-out character work, detail-oriented hilarity, and rambunctious sense of adventure all while being firmly tethered to traditional Christmas themes? Upon first glance, it doesn’t feel very Christmas-y, but when one looks carefully, Go is undeniably a Christmas movie for the post-school, pre-career somewhat-wayward generation. The characters aren’t really slackers, but they’re not really go-getters either, and for that demographic, Doug Liman’s film is great Christmas gift, and for everyone else, it should be the go-to R-rated Christmas film of choice.
The film’s very opening scene features Katie Holmes giving a perky, holiday-appropriate soliloquy about the gloriousness of ‘the surprise’ in the act of gift-giving. Through this dialog, Liman’s film and John August’s script is slyly warning the audience not to get comfortable with what they think may happen, because Go is chock full of plot twists and breaks from narrative convention. The scene is also a declaration right off the bat that what follows is most certainly holiday adventure. Holmes even has classic Hollywood good looks, so opening on her visage is sort of a play right out of a cheap Christmas movie playbook. Show the pretty actor and declare the season. However, Go is a unique entity, so Holmes in this opening lacks impactful makeup and soft-lighting beautification. She is a soggy, ratty-looking mess as we eventually learn that she spent the night partying and walking in the rain. Anything in Go that offers something like saccharine holiday shine has been intentionally bleached dull and indie. It’s been freed of any clichéd, glittery movie magic via the plot’s shady characters, shadier motives, or the general lack of appeal of the working-poor. Yet the themes remain.
Go has a three-pronged narrative of intersecting chapters that all take place one evening around Christmas. Each of the three stories follows a hallmark of Christmas-movie, life-lesson sentimentalism. That is, Christmas movies traditionally latch onto thematics revolving around family, friendship, or love. Sappy, cloying universal values often find their way un-creatively into seasonal films because they go for easy plots with narratively simple personal challenges to overcome. The holidays, of course, are a time for family, friends, and loved ones, so movies often don’t have to try hard to find audiences already reflecting on those values and flipping channels in search of such soppy holiday gunge. Go is not most movies though, so it doesn’t arrive at this messaging easily, yet it still wholly embraces all three of these pillars of personal connection: family, friendship, and love.
The first story follows Ronna (Sarah Polley) through a series of risky decisions around small-time drug deals to make quick cash and avoid eviction. She has no one else and is struggling to survive, so her immediate circle of co-workers, in essence, are her family. She, Manny (Nathan Bexton), and Claire (Holmes) act a lot more like siblings than they do like pals. The film closes on these characters and the very thought of family togetherness and sharing experiences. The second story follows Simon (Desmond Askew) and a group of buddies who go to Vegas, end up in all kinds of trouble, but are able to navigate it via friendship. The third story ultimately chronicles a struggling couple who must find forgiveness in order to rediscover love. A drug deal, an ominous dinner invitation, a car accident, orange juice, and Melissa McCarthy’s memorable 30-second screen debut are all involved, but at the end of the day the segment is about rekindled love. Standard holiday operating procedure.
For plenty of households, late November and December come with plenty of pressure. When the stress of the holidays settles in, it becomes an abundantly common refrain heard each year that Christmas is too commercial with too much pressure on families. Plenty of holiday films have embarked upon commentary on the excessive consumerism of the season. It’s a pretty simple melody, which has haunted many Christmas stories. Jingle All the Way goes after the notion of the ‘be-all-end-all’ toy. It’s a theme in the Grinch movies, too. Go, as it turns out, is the definitive downside-of-Christmas-consumerism movie. The sleaze of capitalism is woven subtly throughout the film, but it’s there in spades. Ronna, Claire, Manny, and Simon work together in retail. Ronna is the embodiment retail workers in December – joyless, defeated, and under-appreciated – yet she never misses a shift. Simon, on the other hand, embodies the opposite. He finds joy and opportunity solely because he escapes the shackles of December retail. Furthermore, and without divulging spoilers, there is a sequence in Go that involves aggressive personal sales tactics and marketing, and it is one of cinema’s cringiest scenes – in all the best ways. Go, in this scene of genius-level uncomfortable humour, translates all forms of forceful sales tactics into nothing short of queasy phoniness. And to further disseminate the risks and negativity of unchecked capitalism, Ronna herself, in the central story, brings on and amplifies her own troubles directly through her own unscrupulous entrepreneurial behaviour.
Go unquestionably lacks prominent Christmas visuals. No Santa. No elves. It never feels like a Christmas winter wonderland, and the holiday décor is never front and centre. However, it’s there. Almost every set is decorated for Christmas. Todd Gaines the drug dealer (Timothy Olyphant in a brilliant performance) doesn’t wear a shirt, but he wears a Santa hat and has decorated a small tree in his apartment. Even Ronna’s car has a string of working Christmas lights. But because all of that is in the background, it’s understandable that back in 1999, Go’s promotional materials almost entirely avoided any reference to Christmas. Its holiday setting and kernel of Christmas messaging were too buried to bother bringing up for marketing purposes. It’s as if Sony had no idea how to go about selling the film, which is always an unfortunate backstory for the life of a film. This explains its dreadful North American theatrical release date: early April. Counter to the freshly fallen snow of most holiday films, Go’s essence was more akin to the grungy, dirty snow of late March, so being dumped at the box office during the spring thaw – April historically is a low-point at the North American box office – was somehow symbolically appropriate, albeit disappointing.
Even on a meta level, Go declares itself as Christmas movie. The initials of its main characters (Claire, Ronna, Simon, Todd, Manny, Adam, Zack) can be arranged to make a loose spelling of Christmas – CRSTMAZ – in the same stylish vein as how the film’s crucially important rave party names itself: ‘Mary Xmas’. That’s sort of what Go is. A deeply layered, underestimated, and un-remembered film with initially unapparent holiday credentials buried under its more obvious cinematic flair. Similarly, Doug Liman’s own reputation after a quarter century in Hollywood is also layered and underappreciated. Both Go and Liman’s directorial career are significant sources of excitement and cinematic influence. This year, anyone looking for edgy Christmas fun should check out Doug Liman’s filmography, starting with his 1999 classic. Go.