Review

Lead role should have been Dying Girl and not self-absorbed Me

Earl (RJ Cyler), Greg’s Asian-snack-obsessed dad (Nick Offerman) and Greg sample some pigs feet in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
Earl (RJ Cyler), Greg’s Asian-snack-obsessed dad (Nick Offerman) and Greg sample some pigs feet in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

If you know anything about film critics -- or, failing that, any group of outspoken, obnoxiously opinionated cranks -- you know they can be a fickle bunch, prone to taking one person's glowing review and treating it as a kind of gauntlet thrown needing to be rejoined.

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Rachel (Olivia Cooke) and Greg (Thomas Mann) hang out in the indie tearjerker Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

It will then surprise you not at all that collecting a mass of them in a small, confined space and pitting their opinions against one another can be an exhausting exercise in back-and-forth one-upmanship. When Me and Earl screened near the beginning of this year's Sundance Film Festival, it generated an enthusiastic early buzz that bordered on the ecstatic among the lucky few who scored a ticket (or who possessed the highly coveted red priority badge). It was funny, we were told, and clever, with a great deal of cinephile in-jokes, but by the end, it turned incredibly, deeply, movingly sad, and it was impossible not to sob while watching it.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

83 Cast: Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Olivia Cooke, Nick Offerman, Connie Britton, Jon Bernthal, Molly Shannon, Hugh Jackman

Director: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Rating: PG-13, for sexual content, drug material, language and some thematic elements

Running time: 105 minutes

Surely, even among the earliest viewers, there were dissenters, but the general buzz had it that this was a film everyone had to see for themselves. By the end of the fest, however, after it had screened a couple of more times, the inevitable backlash came roaring up. It wasn't funny; it was cloying. It wasn't deeply moving; it was wildly and unforgivably manipulative. Even all those cinephile references were condemned as "pandering" to film critics.

So which is it? A clever high-school comedy with a core of moving tragedy, or a manipulative piece of sugar-spun floss best avoided like hot gum on the sidewalk? This is a bit difficult to answer. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's film, from a screenplay written by Jesse Andrews, based upon his own novel, actually contains elements to justify both reactions, but I'll say this much: If you happen to see it more than once, its flaws become far more readily apparent. Consider it a successful one-hitter you will not necessarily want to revisit.

The story concerns Greg (Thomas Mann), a Pittsburgh high-school upperclassman who believes he has cracked the code of school social survival. Rather than align himself with any one group or subdivision, Greg stays just friendly enough with everyone so as to remain largely inconspicuous. The system works, but only if he avoids obvious pitfalls like the cafeteria, where everyone sits by group and ranking (among "disputed territories" in Greg's vernacular). Rather than spend time there, having to display a choice, he instead takes his lunch in the office of his favorite teacher, Mr. McCarthy (Jon Bernthal), a jacked-up history buff with a spindle-beard and neck tattoos, and his best friend Earl (RJ Cyler), a laid-back kid from a rough part of the city, whom he has known most of his life.

Greg and Earl amuse themselves by making short-film parodies of their favorite cinematic foreign and indie classics, which Greg's father -- played amusingly by Nick Offerman -- a tenured sociology professor, got them to watch at an early age (their oeuvre includes such luminescent fare as Eyes Wide Butt, and 2:48 Cowboy, plus many, many references to Werner Herzog). Greg's world gets a good deal more complicated when his well-intentioned mother (Connie Britton) insists that he visit Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a girl from his class just diagnosed with leukemia. What begins as a painful obligation shortly turns into full-blown friendship and devotion, such that when Rachel begins her chemotherapy and starts experiencing the pain and suffering of her disease, Greg becomes more miserable and despondent on her behalf. When it becomes clear she's getting worse and not better, he distances himself from her for a time, causing them both a lot of emotional pain in the process.

As Greg is overly fond of pointing out, with endless winking voice-overs, this isn't an obvious love story in the sense that the two of them become physically intimate on the eve of her potential mortality. It's about an emotionally removed kid being forced to acknowledge the pain and suffering in the world despite his best efforts to lock them out of his house. It's a fair enough conceit, but it does tend to render all the other elements in Greg's life, including Earl and Rachel, as plot devices compelling Greg to eventually see the light than as full-bodied people in their own right.

More troubling, however, is the film's constant sense of placating. It wants to be clever, and arch, and film-school savvy, but -- especially on a repeated viewing -- you can't quite lose the sense that, like its very own protagonist, it's trying too hard to propitiate and win over its audience. Greg is constantly interrupting the narrative to inject quick rebuttals to objections no one ever airs, and the endless stream of title cards (each section of the film is designated with an appellation -- "The Part Where I Meet a Dying Girl," "The Part Where I Get Into a Fight" and so forth) and meta-references after a short while come to seem less clever than desperate, a kid terrified of losing his audience. Whereas the film is seen relentlessly from his point of view, the fact that it reflects his own subjective discomfort can be seen as justified, I suppose, but the truth is, the film suffers some from Greg's limitations. He's not a bad guy by any means, and a fair amount of his observation is amusing, but when things turn heavy, his constant asides and reframings become increasingly irritating and distracting. A kid so frightened of being taken for something he's not, he refuses to let his own story breathe.

This is especially aggrieving when it comes to the strong performance of Cooke, who manages to turn Rachel into more of a three-dimensional character than Greg is ever able to give us. It's her emotional moments -- especially a heartbreaking scene after she first loses her hair -- that give the film any conviction at all. You just wish the filmmakers didn't put themselves in such lockstep with the most emotionally crippled character of the bunch, so that Rachel could become more of her own person and not just another spoke in Greg's ever-spinning hub.

His wry sense of humor, which saves him from many an emotional impact, eventually comes to seem almost callous. There's even one last joke at the very end that suggests he has learned next to nothing on his emotional journey, that all the other characters' pain and misery in service to his enlightenment have been suffered in vain. I can't imagine that was the filmmaker's intention, but it is ironic that a film about a kid trying so hard to control the reaction of his audience lets slip one joke too many, and loses us all anyway.

MovieStyle on 07/03/2015

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