Formative Performances: Sarah Polley in “Go”

It’s Day 4 of Women’s History Month. Who cares?

Just kidding. Obviously, I care very much. If you mentioned Women’s History Month to this character, however, she would do nothing but give you a contemptuous stare, because if you start waxing rhapsodic on a feminist philosophy when she’s trying to get her work done, or take a break from her work, she will have no patience for you. She will look at you like this.

Would you want to be on the receiving end of that look? I wouldn’t.

Go is memorable as the first R-rated movie I sneaked into, after the squeaky-voiced teen at the theater refused to let me and my friend buy tickets. We paid to see something else and then walked right into the theater playing Go. And it was love at first sight with me and Sarah Polley.

Her character, Ronna, is a supermarket cashier who’s facing eviction. She’s seventeen, which makes me think that she’s an emancipated minor, except I can’t picture her going through the actual work of trying to emancipate herself. She picks up an extra shift when one of her co-workers goes out of town. She is bored and irritated with life and everyone around her and will give you THAT LOOK at the smallest, teensiest request that might inconvenience her for no more than five seconds. I love her.

Watch her play Dead Celebrities with her co-workers, played by Nathan Bexton and Katie Holmes (who gives the same performance she gives in every role she’s ever played except for the title role in Pieces of April):

It’s not my favorite scene of hers in the movie, but unfortunately, YouTube is lacking good clips from Go. Anyway, I love Polley in this movie because she’s not just playing boredom and disaffection. The depth of her boredom and disaffection is cavernous.

That all changes, of course, when she gets the opportunity to sell some drugs!

I won’t spoil the rest of the movie. I’ll just say that Sarah Polley taught me a lesson about acting: if you’re cast in an R-rated comedy that’s frothy and fun, your performance can still have depth and layers even as you play along with your other actors. I’ve seen Go several times and I enjoy the film, but whenever Polley is onscreen, I find myself wishing the whole movie was about Ronna.