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| Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon Written by Jesse Andrews |
I was not looking forward to Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, at all. I read that terribly twee title, took one look at this trailer for it, saw that the Sundance set were freaking out over it, and instantly thought "This is a film made by and exclusively for coastal dwelling, Europe envying, Pabst drinking, MSNBC watching, Al Jazerra reading, Steve Jobs worshiping, libertarian leaning, Democrat voting, skinny jean and "ironic" T-shirt clad, eternally irreverent art school attendee wannabe auteur hipsters."
I saw that they worshiped at the altar of Wes Anderson, already a filmmaker often accused by many of exclusively pandering to irreverent skinny jean clad wannabe auteurs, and that they were proving those people right by making a film about irreverent wannabe auteurs filtered through his lense of melancholic whimsy - with the only significant difference being that while Wes' usually evokes the mid-20th Century with his work, these film makers decided to use it to evoke the mid-90s.
That aesthetic choice, sort of makes sense. There's more than a little cultural nostalgia for the brief happy period between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror, the same kind of cultural nostalgia that existed for the postwar period during Wes Anderson's formative years. They've both been seen as a bygone, almost mythic age when life was simpler, and all sorts of amazing things were possible, and also as something that can never really happen again since the crushing weight of reality long ago set in. The magic economy was unsustainable in the long run, the Land of the Free is not invincible, and the Tooth Fairy is a figment of your parent's imagination.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is about that sense of disillusionment... as seen through the eyes of a snarky teenage wannabe auteur with a serious case of senioritis. If that sounds like the most insufferable thing ever to you, like it did to me before I saw it in practice, then you probably won't enjoy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. But if you can get behind that, or identify with any of its main cast, or if you really want to see what an Andersonian take on a book that John Green never wrote looks like, then Me and Earl and the Dying Girl will probably be one of your favorite films of 2015.
Greg Gaines is a socially awkward teenager that just doesn't fit in with his peers, to the point that he's "afraid to call anybody his friend" and puts on a show of lightly interacting with everyone while never delving into any kind of relationship that requires real emotional investment. He's so averse to relationships, that he refers to Earl, the closest he's ever come to a best friend, as a "co-worker" since they spend their ample spare time making no-budget spoofs of classic films. (Said spoofs include Senior Citizen Kane, A Sockwork Orange, A-Box-o'-'Lips Wow!, etc.)
This wall of "carefully cultivated invisibility" comes crashing down when Greg's parents require him to spend time with Rachel, the neighbor's girl that has just been diagnosed with leukemia. They're both hesitant at first, but over time they start to fall for each other, she even starts watching their spoofs and they sort-of agree to make one for her. He gets so fixated on making it just right that he does "literally zero schoolwork" just to keep working on it.
I know that sounds like exactly the sort of pandering thing I railed against at the beginning of this article, let's go through the list. Limited color palates, check. Lutes and 60s Brit pop twinkling across the soundtrack, check. Plot involving amateur film making, check. A main character just self-absorbed enough to be funny but hopefully not enough for the audience to hate them, check. By any logic I should have hated this. But there are two reasons I didn't, the acting is good, and they aren't mimicking Wes Anderson just because they can.
If they had made even one bad casting decision among the film's main cast, the whole thing would have just fallen apart. As written, Greg Gaines is just the worst kind of person. He's convinced that everyone around him is a jerk (because he constantly blows everyone else off), that no one understands him (because he's intentionally isolated himself from his peers), constantly moping about his lack of prospects (while doing absolutely nothing about it himself). If they screwed this part up, everyone would want to reach through the screen and strangle this kid, but Thomas Mann brings real humanity to the role and makes him sympathetic and even relatable after a while, especially when you combine it with why the film-makers are making a tribute to Rushmore.
The film's Andersonian melancholic whimsy (somewhere between Rushmore, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom) is, sort of brilliantly, used to show us the world as seen through the eyes of two people that think they have no future (she's dying of cancer, his grades are nowhere near good enough for a scholarship) at a time when everyone around them is saying they have their whole lives ahead of them. The limited fading color palette and the weird dialogue and the ever-present miasma of 1996 adds a vaguely tragic element to this, because they, and by extension the audience, are hit with a longing for something that constantly surrounds them, but that they have no real experience of themselves, which will definitely strike a cord with the legions of socially awkward teenagers that will give this film a passionate following once it comes out.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is going to be a divisive film once it starts coming out on June 12th. Some people are guaranteed to love it, others are guaranteed to hate it, most won't be able to look past the surface-level self-aware quirk to see the raw adolescent wannabe auteur angst fueling the film, and a few will see that they themselves are fueled by that engine. I know I saw a bit of myself in Greg Gaines, and not just because of a shared name.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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