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Jeffrey M.
Freedman at the 28th Toronto International Film Festival
Go Further
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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.
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Ron
Mann, director of Go Further |
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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. |
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(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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