*** 3 stars
Review from CUE, 3 November 1996, The Melbourne Sunday Age
COLD COMFORT -- By Nick Place
*** 3 stars
Hamish Macbeth finds a head cold is more serious than he thought. That's pretty much how Go Now develops as Robert Carlyle [Macbeth in the hit TV series] plays a similar character to his earthy young Scottish cop, feeling increasingly unwell as the film progresses.
This is a powerful film, and funny -- which is an achievement given the plot. Carlyle is Nick Cameron, a plasterer and hack suburban soccer player who discovers that his frequent clumsiness and minor ailments are more sinister than he realised. The good news is that Nick doesn't have Aids or cancer. That is a relief...until he gets the bad news.
As he battles the confusion and then frustration of his deteriorating condition, Nick's passionate relationship with Karen, a trainee hotel manager, finds itself under the blowtorch. Can a new love affair survive something like this? Will Nick, in venting his rage at his situation, drive Karen away?
Outside their unhappy house, things are also far from rosy. Nick's mates are out of their depth trying to re-evaluate their relationship with the physically crippled version of their old buddy and his family just stare at him like he's a bad dream.
This is a story that could end in tears.
Yet Go Now is set to a toe-tapper of a soundtrack -- lots of Joe Tex! -- and contains a surprising number of laughs, largely due to the clever use of snapshot freezes and captions, which offer regular punchlines and give the feeling that this film is a series of glimpses rather than a narrative. For sports fans, the tight shots of the coach watching his soccer team in action are hilarious.
Carlyle proves once more that he has a mortgage on every role in
Britain that calls for a weedy guy with a thick accent. Carlyle is
so likeable, so human, with a smile and self-deprecating humor that
glows off the screen. However, Middlemarch's Juliet Aubrey goes
close to stealing the film, playing Karen, the intelligent, warm
girlfriend trying to remain strong and true. And not always managing
it.
Go Now is allowed to drift along so that Nick's deterioration feels as slow, as frustrating and as crippling as it must be for those who actually suffer his illness. With a script guided by one of Britain's leading scriptwriters but created by a man who is still very much in Nick's shoes, the realism of the situation cannot be denied.
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