Michael Winterbottom and Jimmy McGovern take a story that usually arrives with violins and tell it with pub jokes and bad plastering instead. Robert Carlyle is exact and unshowy, and the film is honest about illness until its last ten minutes, when it blinks.
There is a kind of film about a young man and a terrible diagnosis, and most of us have learned to flinch when one appears. Go Now knows this and spends most of its 81 minutes refusing to be it. Jimmy McGovern and Paul Henry Powell’s script is set among plasterers and Sunday footballers in Bristol, and when Nick Cameron’s body begins to fail him, nobody on screen reaches for a tissue. They reach for the next insult. That is the film’s method, and for an hour and a quarter it works better than we had any right to expect.
Robert Carlyle made this just before Trainspotting and The Full Monty, and you can see why those parts followed. Nick is a man whose whole sense of himself is physical: he works with his hands, he plays in the mud on a Sunday, he lifts his girlfriend off her feet when he is pleased with her. Carlyle plays the first signs of the illness as irritation rather than fear. A dropped trowel is the plaster’s fault; blurred vision is a bad night’s sleep. When the fear does arrive it comes out as temper, mostly aimed at the person who least deserves it, and Carlyle never once asks us to like him for it. It is a small, precise performance and the film rests on it.
Juliet Aubrey has the thankless part, and she plays it without complaint. Karen is the one who stays, and the script does not give her a great deal to do beyond staying; one or two critics have found her flat beside the rest of the cast, and we see what they mean. What Aubrey does well is listen. In the long middle stretch she is mostly watching Nick decide whether to shut her out, and she makes the watching count. James Nesbitt’s Tony is the other reason to see it. He is the mate who turns up at the hospital with a carrier bag of cans and a new joke about wheelchairs, and Nesbitt lets you see exactly how frightened the joker is. Sophie Okonedo, as Karen’s flatmate Paula, has less screen time than she deserves and uses all of it.
Michael Winterbottom shoots the whole thing quickly and close. Daf Hobson’s camera is often handheld and the light is the light of a Bristol afternoon, grey and unflattering, with no attempt to make a bedsit or a hospital corridor look like anything else. Hayden Pearce’s design gives Nick and Karen a flat with half-finished walls, which is a plasterer’s joke and also a fair picture of the relationship. Rachael Fleming dresses everyone in the tracksuits and work jeans they would own, and Trevor Waite cuts the football scenes like a Saturday-evening highlights package, fast and loud and over before anyone has time to be sad about them. Alastair Gavin’s music stays out of the way for most of the running time, which is the right call for this material.
The moment that got at us was a plain one. Nick is up a ladder on a job, doing the thing he has done for years, and his hand will not do what he tells it. The plaster goes on wrong. Nobody says anything; Carlyle simply looks at the wall, and then at his hand, and climbs down. We had been laughing a minute earlier, and we found we had stopped. It is the only scene in the film where the illness is shown rather than talked about, and it does more than all the hospital scenes put together.
Then there is the ending, which we will not describe. Having spent 70 minutes being dry and awkward and true, the film decides it would like to be uplifting after all, and it goes about it with a directness that does not sit with what has come before. The reviews so far have mostly forgiven this, and we have forgiven most of it too, but it is a lapse, and it is the thing you will be arguing about on the way to the kettle.
Set against Winterbottom’s own early work, this is warmer than Butterfly Kiss and plainer than Jude, and it shows the quick, unfussy manner that would carry him through the next decade. Set against McGovern’s television writing, with its taste for men who cannot say what is wrong with them, it is entirely of a piece. Watch it with someone who will laugh at the hospital jokes, and do not be surprised if the last ten minutes leave you slightly less sure of the film than the first seventy.
