The Go-Getter

[June 4th, 2008]

The eyes of actress Zooey Deschanel are brilliant blue and always a little distant and preoccupied, so that even when she’s speaking, she appears lost in a personal reverie—dreaming, one hopes, of spending an afternoon with you, taking you out for ice cream, and eventually guiding you back to a hotel for the kind of affectionate sex that involves a lot of soft kissing. In Martin Hynes’ movie The Go-Getter, which is principally a love letter to those eyes, it turns out that this is exactly what she is thinking. The ice cream, she explains while reclined on a motel mattress, is a double scoop of mint Oreo and coffee, and the sex is imminent. And if she is not, technically, talking to you in this monologue, the movie’s hero is enough of a cipher that he can be safely ignored, and at any rate the scene is shot from above his shoulder, so that he might as well not be there. Congratulations, viewer: Zooey Deschanel totally hearts you, too.

The Go-Getter is being marketed in Oregon as the film where local singer-songwriter M. Ward met Deschanel on the set and, charmed by her honeyed voice and general adorability, enlisted her as the chanteuse of his side project She & Him. The movie, an agreeable little picaresque that starts in Eugene—director Hynes’ hometown—and breezes its way down to Mexico, is mainly a reiteration of that discovery. Ward contributes the soundtrack and in the opening credits donates a car-wash uniform to the protagonist, 19-year-old Mercer (Lou Taylor Pucci, Thumbsucker). Mercer uses the outfit to steal a station wagon, which he plans to drive until he can find his estranged half-brother and inform him of their mother’s death. But the car’s owner has left her cell in the vehicle, and when she calls—lo and behold—she isn’t angry, but wants him to continue his journey so long as he keeps talking to her. You’ll never guess who the girl is.

Considering how many laboriously idiosyncratic characters Mercer encounters before his rescue, The Go-Getter isn’t nearly as irritating as it ought to be. The M. Ward songs help a lot, as does Hynes’ mild visual experimentation—he dramatizes one of Mercer’s late-night phone chats by placing Deschanel in the car’s back seat and illuminating her face with a headlamp whenever she speaks. But it’s a disappointment when the voice on the other end of the line turns out to be the tender fulfillment of all young male wishes. The Go-Getter is a romance paperback for indie rockers, and there’s nothing wrong with love at first ice-cream scoop. But it’s an insult to the eyes of Zooey Deschanel to suggest that they’re lost in the fantasy you want them to see. R.