How 'Me And Earl And The Dying Girl' Brilliantly Dismantles Its Own Cliches

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

Forget ‘dying’, the girl in the title of Me And Earl And The Dying Girl is already dead. In the film’s opening gambit, its mumbling, self-loathing, unreliable narrator, Greg (Thomas Mann) talks of his story, this story, from the past-tense; a tale of how his final year of high-school found him making “a film so bad it literally killed someone”. Like everything he says, it’s loaded with self-defensiveness and cynicism, but once said, it’s never forgotten. So, when, later on, in a talking-directly-to-the-audience aside, he promises that the girl in question —Rachel (Olivia Cooke), mid-battle with leukaemia— won’t die, you know not to trust him, those lines deep in a case of denial.

This beginning to the film —writer Jesse Andrews adapting the screenplay from his own novel— is too po-mo and cute; the narration dancing around the very notion of telling a story. It introduces the ironic element to Me And Earl And The Dying Girl that allows a knowing, po-mo-ing audience to have a safe ‘in’ to one of cinema’s most questionable, risible genres: the cancer movie.

The presence of ‘me’ in the title anchors the film in its protagonist’s perspective, and, at times, in his lack thereof. Its entire story’s told from the POV of an adolescent male, with all the self-centredness and self-obsessiveness that suggests. In all our anti-hero’s anxious fussiness and run-amok control-freak-ness, in his haughty intellectual superiority and cavernous insecurity, in his petulant dickishness and inability to see outside of himself, it’s a little like watching Rushmore if it was told entirely from the mind of Max Fischer.

Wes Anderson and Michel Gondry linger throughout Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, which is directed, with unexpected aplomb, by long-time second-unit/TV-series vet Alfonso Gómez-Rejón. Greg and the titular Earl (Ronald Cyler II) home-make Sweded, wackadoo, whimsical takes on Criterion Collection films, riffing on old titles with absurdist humour. There’s My Dinner With Andre The Giant, Death In Tennis, Pooping Tom, Brew Ververt, The 400 Bros, Eyes Wide Butt, and, best of all, A Sockwork Orange, where monocled sock-puppets sip their Moloko-plus.

This pair of would-be auteurs have no real ideas of their own, happy in the safety —a comfortable adolescent-male jokiness— of after-school hijinks and aimed-for awfulness. Though Earl is his constant companion and collaborator, Greg refuses to call him a friend; instead settling, with much emotional retardation and troubling social condescension, on dubbing him a ‘co-worker’. Our narrator imagines himself as a lone-wolf, an island, a neutral party amidst a high-school milieu he has delineated into cliché cliques cribbed from John Hughes movies. He and Earl hide out in the office of John Bernthal’s teacher —who gets his students to chant ‘Respect the research!’, and has the same tattooed in Gothic script on his hulking neck— watching videos of Werner Herzog; the self-made mythos of one of cinema’s great dreamers catnip to their impressionable minds.

When Greg’s well-meaning mother (Connie Britton) demands he spend time with Rachel, a classmate who’s just been diagnosed with leukaemia, he acts like any selfish adolescent dickwad would: as if his mother is all-too-annoying, this a horrible burden on him. Eventually, of course, this is the beginning of a transformative experience, as our hero learns to let go off his emotional defensiveness, to care about someone outside himself, to embrace life, to grow up.

On paper, this reads as hugely problematic: Me And Earl And The Dying Girl a film in which a white male hero learns to live and love thanks to his Magical Negro best-friend and a female character who is narratively sacrificed just, seemingly, to inspire him. But both Andrews, as writer, and Gómez-Rejón, as director, are aware of the clichés of cancer-movies and coming-of-age tales (for those who’ve just seen Dope and Paper Towns, it’s fun spotting the same tropes persisting across this year’s definitive teen-movies), and of the problematic position of telling a tale via an unreliable narrator.

When Greg —it all-too-apt he’s represented, in the title, as ‘Me’ first—whinges about the burden of filling in a college application essay, the Dying Girl reminds him she has Stage 4 cancer, and that he’s being a dick. Later, when she stops chemo treatment and moves towards palliative care, the extent of his self-centric dickishness becomes all too apparent, as he throws a tantrum at her for doing so. But it’s also one of many moments where Gómez-Rejón, who dedicates the film to his own late father, gets to skewer the culture of cancer: that All-American obsession with framing it as a fight to be won, victory to be inspired by copious self-help platitudes.

Gómez-Rejón’s direction is, considering the teen-cancer genre, unexpectedly excellent. The first meeting between our boy and girl comes, in an evocative two-shot, at either end of a staircase, each remote and distant and the bottom/top of the stairs. When he gets mad that she’s stopping treatment (“giving up” the fight), it’s told in a profound single-take scene, where Mann and Cooke get to inhabit the emotions, to act without unnecessary cuts interjecting. And the passage-of-time montages are expertly played, evoking Anderson in the way they blast Brian Eno loud, but Orson Welles in the way the passage of time is conveyed by suggestive imagery.

The best montage —shot after shot pulling up on Rachel’s house— establishes what it’s like to constantly return to the same bedside, with an earnestness that the ironic intertitles (which chart the ‘Doomed Friendship’ in days) can’t convey. At first, the fact that the narrative sides with the guy coming to the same room, rather than the girl holed up in it, contributes to the niggling, problematic feeling; making you wonder if this really is a film in which a Dying Girl is a Life Lesson used to inspire a college entrance exam.

But, after the big emotional showstopper —where Greg unveils the film that literally kills someone by hospital bedside, and Eno’s eternal The Big Ship resounds profoundly— the narrative has an amazing final-coda surprise in-store; offering a glimpse into the secret world of its Dying Girl. This quells any doubts about the depth of her characterisation, and the ‘worth’ of her life in this narrative world. And it perfectly, profoundly articulates the film’s theme: that, even after people die, you can still learn more about them, and more from them.

THE GIFT

In The Gift, local boy-made-good Joel Edgerton doesn’t just star, as an unwelcome intruder in the bourgeois lives of married couple Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall. Edgerton also serves as its writer-director, and this often-uncomfortable, genuinely-tense thriller shows a level of genuine skill in both roles. Its script plays with the tropes of psycho-caller and home-invasion movies, as Edgerton, a barely-remembered old school friend of Bateman’s, keeps coming around uninvited to their big, stark, modernist palace in the LA hills. His creepy integration into their lives has earnt comparisons to The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, but watching The Gift, I couldn’t help but think: goddamn it, the Bogan Builder from The Secret Life Of Us is totally referencing Michael Haneke’s Caché!

Whilst Edgerton leans heavily on genre tropes, he often uses them as misdirection, to lull an audience into a false sense of security and, then, question their preconceptions. His character is announced, on arrival, as undoubted psycho; you just waiting for the moment when he, like, ties our loving couple and takes to them with a bone-saw or something. But that moment never comes. Instead, with Hall functioning as the central character, the notion of villainy slowly, deftly shifts; old school-days secrets coming to the surface, Bateman’s true nature called into question, paranoia becoming the sustained state.

With little violence, no vengeance, and few moments of ‘relief’, Edgerton dodges the traps of thrillers, which oft seek solely to indulge our basest instincts. Instead, The Gift is a genuinely thoughtful take on genre, a film not just about the secrets in a past and the secrets in a marriage, but about the culture of bullying and cycles of abuse.