GOING ALL THE WAY

GOING ALL THE WAY is a blatant, blunt attack on the values held by Americans in the 1950’s. Included in this adolescent assault on responsibility are attacks on Midwestern values, Christianity, small town life, parental judgment, sexual mores, and much more. This vile film has received commendation from those professional rebels in the mass media who hate responsibility and all that is good. The movie is a trumped up story of alienation, an adolescent tale bathed in rebellion and prompted by a false fear of rejection.

Sonny Burns (Jeremy Davies) is returning home to Indianapolis after serving his country during the Korean War, not on the front line, but at a bureaucratic post in the States. Sonny is full of lusts and angst, awkward, embarrassed, insecure, and feels alienated. On the train home, he meets one of his high school classmates, Gunner Casselman (Ben Affleck), the all American big man on campus, who got to fight in Korea but had his own personal epiphany in the whore houses in Japan. Slightly alienated by his service overseas, Gunner proceeds to fill Sonny with so much Saki that Sonny’s first action on returning home is vomiting his guts out.

Gunner is met by a beautiful woman at the train station, who turns out to be his mother, Nina. Sonny is met by his doting parents. His effusive mother spouts Bible verses and praises God in the most obnoxious manner, while his milquetoast father hangs around in the background, sometimes affirming what his mother says. When he retires to his room, his mother brings him a Bible tract. When he tosses that against the wall and curses God, she brings him a picture of Jesus. She becomes disturbed when she discovers that he is hanging out with Gunner.

Gunner wants to find himself, but at the same time he wants his sexual fix. On Saturday night, Gunner talks Sonny into double dating, and Sonny obliges by fornicating with the beautiful girl next door who has loved him all her life and would do and does anything for him. Sonny’s mother brings in an ex-con evangelist to witness to Sonny. Later, when Sonny tries to masturbate in his bunk bed, he is shocked to find that the evangelist is on the top bunk. The evangelist uses the appropriate Bible verses to rebuke Sonny for his perversion.

Gunner and Sonny want more than the girl next door, so they decide take up with the fast, wealthy, eastern-educated Jewish girls in town. Gunner’s mother makes some highly offensive anti-Semitic statements, showing the audience just how stupid Christians are. Sonny fails to fornicate with the Jewish princess because he spends his time drinking himself into impotence. Shamed by his failure, he tries to commit suicide and eventually ends up in a violent car crash that puts him in traction for six months.

Gunner meanwhile takes off for New York. When Sonny gets out, he abandons his parents heads off for New York.

At the screening of this movie, the audience tittered and applauded whenever Christians were being mocked and moral values were being rebuked. The arty direction tried to give the film a 1950’s home-movie look, though most often this cinematographic pretense appeared to a cover for the incompetent filmmaking. This coming of age story touched all the politically correct buttons, but missed out on the most important element of good drama: a sense of jeopardy arising from the dastardly deeds of a real villain. Instead, the movie played like the lame autobiography of an adolescent writer, who is preoccupied with sex and will curse God to get it.

The writer, Dan Wakefield, is renowned. He is supposed to be a Christian. He teaches spiritual seminars around the country, though most of his seminars tend towards the New Age. Here, he expresses a deep sense of resentment about the fatherhood of God, the grace of God, the love of God which gives us boundaries to protect ourselves from the error of our ways, and the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Also, there is a certain misogyny in his “sleep with them and leave them” attitude toward women and an embarrassment to having these lovely young girls perform for his salacious heroes on the big screen.

There is nothing erotic about this movie. There is nothing profound. It is merely the story of a guy who wants to rebel against authority, so that he can fulfill his sexual itch.