Going All the Way
After honing his high-gloss visual style shooting music videos for Pearl Jam and U2, director Mark Pellington made his debut feature with this nostalgic adaptation of Dan Wakefield’s 1970 novel about two young Korean War veterans looking for sex, romance and adventure in conservative 1950s Indiana. Still relatively unknown at the time, Ben Affleck is boyishly charming here as a reformed high-school jock, while Jeremy Davis shines as his sensitive artist buddy. Pellington finds fresh, funny, tender angles on familiar coming-of-age material, aided by a stellar cast which also features Rachel Weisz, Rose McGowan and Nick Offerman.
Jeremy Davies, Ben Affleck, Amy Locane
- Notes From OscilloscopeMark Pellington’s GOING ALL THE WAY is the epitome of what O-Scope stands for: It’s both unconventional and the result of a laborious creative endeavor in the name of art. Pellington’s first feature was not without its production complications. Hindsight can be 20/20, and 25 years on, what filmmaker wouldn’t want to revisit their first, fraught production when presented the opportunity to do so? The Director’s Edit presented here represents the truest version of Pellington’s book adaptation and was constructed from a wholesale re-edit that necessitated returning to the original camera negatives (45 reels of them, to be exact), since nearly an hour of footage was not in the theatrical cut. Also, this thing’s got a pretty good cast!
