Go Further by Jeffrey M. Freedman

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Jeffrey M. Freedman at the 28th Toronto International Film Festival  

Go Further

One of the most talked about films at this 28th Toronto International Film Festival and certainly the most controversial documentary is Ron Mann’s Go Further.  The movie is a road show about Woody Harrelson’s proselytizing trip down California’s PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) aimed at spreading the good word about sustainable living. Woody, raw food chef, a hemp activist and a junk-food addict covered 1,300 miles down the Pacific Coast Highway, from Seattle to Los Angeles, visiting organic farmers and ecology activists as they traversed I-101. In addition to their hemp-fueled motor home, they also bicycled part of the way. 

Toronto documentarian Ron Mann’s film is a hybrid of ‘Let’s Get Lost,’ ‘On the Road’ and ‘My Dinner With Andre;’ an eat your sprouts, kick your (cigarette) butts, apotheosis of yoga and the corn dog/pesticide/fossil fuel-free lifestyle.  

Mann told Filmmakers that Harrelson’s personal convictions about the environment and a good, clean healthy lifestyle were the inspirations behind the film. “He told me he just wants to do what’s right,” Mann said of his long-time friend whom he referred to as an ‘industrial hemp activist.’ “He is someone who, in the time that I’ve know him, really, really does care about the planet and acts on his convictions.” 

Mann first read about Woody’s planned trip down the PCH in High Times magazine. Considering the source, you can’t blame him for getting excited. What the Lancet is to medical research professionals, High Times is to serious and committed potheads. When he read that Woody was taking a trip down the PCH to promote sustainable living and the organic lifestyle, Mann decided, "as he says, to "hop on the bus" (i.e. raise enough bread from MuchMusic in Toronto to make a documentary about the journey). 

“I asked him if anybody was documenting the trip because I thought it would be a really good idea. I’d seen Michael Moore’s “The Big One” (which documents Moore's journey across the United States to promote his 1996 book, Downsize This! and his look at joblessness in the U.S), which was one of my favorite Michael Moore films.”

“I had no idea what to expect,” Mann continued. “It became a road movie with Woody as the vehicle. We’ve been on the wrong road and we have to get on the right road. I asked Woody what he’d like the audience to feel at the end of the film and what he said after thinking about it, is that he wanted an audience to feel hope.”

U2, Dave Matthews, Lenny Kravitz, Ani DiFranco and the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir contributed songs and performances for the soundtrack.

Ron Mann
Ron Mann, director of Go Further

 

 

As a vegetarian (17 years veg’, 8 years vegan), yoga enthusiast, animal rights advocate and conservationist, it’s difficult for me to be objective about Go Further; hard to say anything negative about a movie star who drives a trailer home powered by hemp fuel full of tree-huggers down Interstate 101 promoting what they call Simple Organic Living (SOL). 

Hard, but not impossible.   

The story starts out cute enough as the central focus of the road trip, in addition to being a peripatetic sermon on the benefits of eating organic, solar heating, hemp fueling etc., becomes an attempt to organic-ize the merry band’s junk food addict crewmember, Steve, a lovable, what-me-worry, celebrity-loving ‘dude’ whose pronounced overbite only adds to his insouciant wit and killer smile. 

(Harrelson met him when Steve was working as a production assistant on the set of ‘Will & Grace’). 

“He was a junk food junky who used to hang out at Fatburger in Los Angeles,” Mann says. “His transformation became the focus of the film, not Woody. For people who maybe couldn’t relate to Woody, Steve was a young, wisecracking,  burger-chomping, milk-shake guzzling kid who became the focus of the film. It’s through him and his transformation that we experience the movie.” 

Mann added that he doesn’t think people will talk about the film as an eco film about what’s good for you. “They’ll talk about it as the funniest documentary I’ve ever seen. I think that was my approach from the very beginning, to not be didactic, to not be polemic but to really entertain people.” While the film is funny and entertaining in places, such as when Steve uses a bullhorn to tell people to stop eating corn dogs, it really isn’t side-splitting funny or all that entertaining. And despite Mann’s intention to not make the documentary a polemic about good living, a lot of people are coming away from Go Further feeling it is blatantly one-sided and preachy. 

Sure, Woody’s promotion of the eco lifestyle makes sense and it is almost impossible to argue with someone who looks that healthy and appears to be devoid of the ubiquitous distemper that seems to affect most of Hollywood and many of the frenzied journalists and movie-goers at the 28thTIFF. But on the heels of Michael Moore’s confrontational documentary filmmaking, audiences seem skeptical about unchallenged harangues about deforestation, depletion of fossil fuels and any other popular celebrity cause, even if the messenger looks like he just spent the better part of his summer at the Esalen Institute. And even though there are some entertaining moments with ‘Merry Prankster’ Ken Kesey and an organic worm farmer , Woody’s constant proselytizing and promotion of  the SOL lifestyle and its apparently unassailable benefits makes you wonder why they didn’t call this film Go Fuhrer.

GO FURTHER
Director: Ron Mann
Producer: Ron Mann
Writer: Solomon Vesta
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Ken Kesey, 
Cinematographer: Alan Barker, Andrew Black, Robert Fresco, Rob Heydon, Ron Mann.
Original Music: Guido Luciani
Editor: Ryan Feldman, Robert Kennedy, Sue Len Quon, John Sanders.
Art Direction: Lynne Dalgleish

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