The most important word in the title Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is “me.” This is a film about a teenage boy’s journey from self-absorption to compassion, his transformation facilitated by a newfound friendship with a girl who has terminal cancer. It is a film entirely filtered through the perceptions of a disaffected teenager who believes his struggles put him above everybody else. This may sound insufferable, but the film does have formidable charms. There are certainly problems inherent to this premise, but there is a certain cleverness to its execution that makes it more than bearable.
Greg (Thomas Mann) is just trying to get through high school by being invisible. He belongs to no particular subgroup within the high school hierarchy, making special effort to only have low-level interactions with everyone. He spends most of his time with Earl (RJ Cyler), who shares his love for foreign arthouse cinema. Together, they make silly parodies of the films that they love. Then one day, Greg’s mom forces him to call on Rachel (Olivia Cooke), who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Despite his unwillingness to get close to anyone, he actually becomes friends with Rachel, and that forces him to confront the possibility of losing someone he loves.
The problem with the “me” in this movie is that he isn’t very interesting. He is a collection of teenage outsider tropes that mistake self-deprecation for actual charm. That the film gives him the focus instead of say, the girl with cancer, feels like a mistake. But this is also kind of what the film is about. More than once, Greg is told to get out of his own head, to consider that perhaps the world doesn’t revolve around him. This doesn’t make the film any more substantial in the end, but the awareness does allow for a sort of thematic resonance even as the film gets into even more questionable personal territory.
The film does make much of this look interesting. The characters in the film are film buffs, and the film itself comes to reflect that in its manner of shooting. It eschews a mainstream aesthetic in favor of trickier bits of camera movement that reference some of the greats of art cinema. The story name checks Werner Herzog, Stan Brakhage, Powell and Pressburger, and a multitude of other arthouse greats, and the film goes out of its way to pay tribute to those masters. It doesn’t exactly add up to a complete visual style, but it does make the film look different from everything else.
The film leans heavily on its cast to make the story work. A lot of these characters are pretty thin, and it’s up to the actors to really give them personality beyond singular traits. Thomas Mann does manage to make Greg seem like more than just an insufferable jerk. Olivia Cooke and RJ Cyler aren’t given a whole lot to do, but they are welcome presences anyway. It’s the adults who get to have the most in this film. Memorable turns from Nick Offerman, Connie Britton, Molly Shannon and Jon Bernthal lend this film a bounciness that isn’t really present in the script.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is enough of a crowd pleaser to warrant a recommendation. At the very least, it looks and feels different from much of what makes into our cinemas. But this is a film that doesn’t quite earn its themes, its story leaning too heavily on the easy signifiers of emotion rather than building it all up organically. It doesn’t feel substantial, despite the heaviness of its subject matter. It is slick, and it is charming, but it isn’t able to reach the emotional heights that the subject warrants.
My Rating:
