Go Now

Michael Winterbottom’s early feature about a young man (Robert Carlyle) succumbing to multiple sclerosis gives little indication of the good things that were to come from the director. Yes, one can cite his depiction of the medical aspects of the disease  as evidence of his commitment to realism (abetted by the thick Scots accents) and the simultaneously tragic and life-affirming story as a reflection of Winterbottom’s humanistic worldview but much of the film is glibly conventional in realization and were it not for the inherent pathos of the subject-matter it would be largely dismissable.

Winterbottom spends the first 30 minutes or so setting up Carlyle as Nick, a likely Scots lad, mad about soccer and his mates but with a sensitivity that sets him just a tad above them, the kind of role that Carlyle would make his stock-in-trade. Because he’s such a charmer he wins the affection of the lovely Karen (Juliet Aubrey) and she becomes the main substance of Nick’s life. When Winterbottom attends to  their relationship, the film is quite affecting as MS eats into both of them, when he switches to Nick's retarded mates it's as tedious as they are.

I had some trouble understanding the timeline, with Nick seeming to deteriorate quite rapidly, then recover somewhat but perhaps this reflects the real course of the disease. Although no match for Daniel Day-Lewis’s Christy Brown (My Left Foot, 1989) Carlyle does a convincing job of depicting a MS sufferer but overall at 81 minutes Winterbottom tries to fit in too much and the result is a busy narrative that relies on sentiment rather than reflection to win our support.

 

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