It’s become nearly common sense to say that anything you see in the movies you shouldn’t try at home but when it comes to writer/director Martin Hynes’ critically acclaimed Sundance Film Festival indie hit, The Go-Getter, it’d probably be best to extend that warning to your local car wash and parking lots.
Running out of ways for would-be lovers to meet, in a wonderfully inventive alternative to having the two lock eyes and become drawn together with near magnetic force (that’s called lust, my friends) or literally bumping into one another (which looks incredibly painful), Hynes comes up with a Kerouac and Huck Finn inspired humdinger with a felony thrown in for good measure. Why not steal her car?
Of course, this isn’t truly what makes Mercer run in the opening of Hynes’ film—having read Huck Finn and discovering that more than anything else it made him realize just how “stuck” he felt, he crafts plans for a premeditated vehicular heist. Namely — borrow a friend’s t-shirt to get into the local car-wash without causing speculation, hop into the closest ride that doesn’t look like it’d fall apart, and pick up one’s belongings later on the side of the road.
Mercer (wonderfully played by the subtle and emotive Lou Taylor Pucci) gets away with it too until a cell phone rings and after a mini freak-out, he decides he’ll answer it, since by then he has nothing to lose. Instead of it being the local fuzz, he finds himself talking with the beguiling automobile owner, voiced by independent film’s coolest young actress, Zooey Deschanel. Oddly, yet believably (possibly because she’s voiced by Deschanel who can do anything from fake romantic chemistry with Will Ferrell in Elf or make you laugh and nearly cry all in the same scene in Mumford), she decides she won’t press charges. Eager to make it up to her, Mercer rattles off a laundry list of ideas from helping out with yard work or chores but the forgiving Deschanel says that she’ll let him use her wheels on his trip as long as he calls her regularly to fill him in on what’s happening.
Although it initially felt as though the idea to “go west, young man,” was spontaneous, soon we realize—and it is an indie (read: grab your tissues) after all – that Mercer is a nineteen-year-old kid on a mission. Having lost his mother to slow, excruciating cancer eight months earlier, he decides to track down his estranged brother Arlen (Jsu Garcia) who is eighteen years his senior and whom he’d last seen at the age of five and inform him about what has happened. And along the path to Arlen, he begins realizing that he may not really know his brother as well as he thinks when he receives everything from a punch to a threat as he tries retracing the man’s steps.
Article comments