Tuesday, July 12, 2005
"EVERYTHING SHE SAYS IS A LIE, INCLUDING 'AND' AND 'THE'"
Well, I did it. I finally made my way back to a movie theater for the first time in about a month, catching Me and You and Everyone We Know at the Landmark Century Centre last night. It felt both good and bad to be back. The good: Being intellectually engaged with a new film for an hour and a half on a Monday night. The bad: The annoying people that I saw the film with and, sadly, the film itself.
First of all the audience: I got to the mall and stepped into the elevator to go up to the theater. Just as the door was closing, two other people got in, a man and a woman. The man - late twenties or early thirties, bad facial hair - began talking at the top of his voice to the woman about his brother coming out of the closet. It was a short elevator ride, but I got to hear all kinds of details about his brother's sexual and romantic life, dating from when he first popped out of the womb. As the elevator reached our destination, the woman asked, "And you had no idea?" To which the man replied, "You know fags, they're so secretive." Needless to say, they were going to see the same movie.
Me and You and Everyone We Know, written and directed by Miranda July, who is also the lead actress, is about a group of people leading interconnected lives in, well, uh, L.A., maybe. In the opening scene, Richard (John Hawkes) is separating from his wife; they have two sons, Peter (Miles Thompson), about twelve to fourteen, and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff), about six. Richard is understandably upset about the situation, and tells his wife and children that they should do something to commemorate the break-up. They respond to his idea with blank looks. He then walks out to the front yard of the family home, douses his hand with lighter fluid, and sets it on fire.
How's that for an opener? We don't know Richard, don't know much about him, yet the film asks us to sympathize with him from the start, even though we've seen him do something incredibly self-destructive and almost certainly frightening to his children. It's not that I can't feel any sympathy for anyone that engages in self-destructive bahvior, it's that I need to know a little more about that person before I commiserate. But wait, you might say, you're not being fair, this was the first scene, didn't the movie go on to develop the characters so that you could make a more considered decision about whether you sympathized with them or not? My answer is that Me and You and Everyone We Know attempted to develop the characters, but in such an unbelievable manner that I wound up not caring about them at all.
For example, getting back to the burned hand. After that incident, the film moves on to Richard's everyday life as a shoe salesman in a department store. He mentions his burned hand to a co-worker, again saying something to the effect that he wanted to somehow mark his separation from his wife. The co-worker is generally sympathetic, acts like Richard is just fine. We then see Richard's sons coming to spend the weekend with him. Is it really likely that a man who has intentionally lit his hand on fire and talks about it nonchalantly would be treated as a friend by his co-workers? Would he be given joint custody of his children, one of whom is very young? It's possible, I suppose, but unlikely. The film doesn't address the potentially serious consequences of the hand-burning, instead it expects us to be satisfied with Richard's blithe, new-agey explanation, "I was trying to save my life." Well, I guess it's okay to light your hand on fire, if you have a nice poetic way of explaining it.
There are other equally unlikely developments in Me and You and Everyone We Know, I'll just list a few: six-year old Robby frequents internet sex chat rooms where he likes to write about poop; he arranges to meet a stranger at a park; the stranger turns out to be someone connected to the other characters; the young girl that lives next door to Richard and befriends Peter buys expensive home appliances so that she will have a "dowry" for her husband; Richard's co-worker has a sexually suggestive conversation with two teenage girls in the neighborhood and then posts signs on his living room window about the things that he wants to do to them; the two girls have an argument about who's better at oral sex and settle it by experimenting on Peter.
None of these incidents are entirely unbelievable, but they're all unlikely, and cumulatively they make Me and You and Everyone We Know feel false. I felt like I was just watching a lot of quirky behavior that was quirky for its own sake. I never came to a deeper understanding of any of the characters; they felt opaque from beginning to end. I couldn't tell you any more about them after the film was over than before it began.
The insidious thing about the quirkiness Me and You and Everyone We Know is that to many people it's judgment-proof. People just say, "Hey, it's quirky. So what? People do all kinds of strange things." My response is that art tries to engage with human experience, tries to say something, however small, about human existence. Observing behavior that is odd for the sake of being odd is one thing, but to pretend that it has something to say about human life is ludicrous. ¶ 8:10 AM
First of all the audience: I got to the mall and stepped into the elevator to go up to the theater. Just as the door was closing, two other people got in, a man and a woman. The man - late twenties or early thirties, bad facial hair - began talking at the top of his voice to the woman about his brother coming out of the closet. It was a short elevator ride, but I got to hear all kinds of details about his brother's sexual and romantic life, dating from when he first popped out of the womb. As the elevator reached our destination, the woman asked, "And you had no idea?" To which the man replied, "You know fags, they're so secretive." Needless to say, they were going to see the same movie.
Me and You and Everyone We Know, written and directed by Miranda July, who is also the lead actress, is about a group of people leading interconnected lives in, well, uh, L.A., maybe. In the opening scene, Richard (John Hawkes) is separating from his wife; they have two sons, Peter (Miles Thompson), about twelve to fourteen, and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff), about six. Richard is understandably upset about the situation, and tells his wife and children that they should do something to commemorate the break-up. They respond to his idea with blank looks. He then walks out to the front yard of the family home, douses his hand with lighter fluid, and sets it on fire.
How's that for an opener? We don't know Richard, don't know much about him, yet the film asks us to sympathize with him from the start, even though we've seen him do something incredibly self-destructive and almost certainly frightening to his children. It's not that I can't feel any sympathy for anyone that engages in self-destructive bahvior, it's that I need to know a little more about that person before I commiserate. But wait, you might say, you're not being fair, this was the first scene, didn't the movie go on to develop the characters so that you could make a more considered decision about whether you sympathized with them or not? My answer is that Me and You and Everyone We Know attempted to develop the characters, but in such an unbelievable manner that I wound up not caring about them at all.
For example, getting back to the burned hand. After that incident, the film moves on to Richard's everyday life as a shoe salesman in a department store. He mentions his burned hand to a co-worker, again saying something to the effect that he wanted to somehow mark his separation from his wife. The co-worker is generally sympathetic, acts like Richard is just fine. We then see Richard's sons coming to spend the weekend with him. Is it really likely that a man who has intentionally lit his hand on fire and talks about it nonchalantly would be treated as a friend by his co-workers? Would he be given joint custody of his children, one of whom is very young? It's possible, I suppose, but unlikely. The film doesn't address the potentially serious consequences of the hand-burning, instead it expects us to be satisfied with Richard's blithe, new-agey explanation, "I was trying to save my life." Well, I guess it's okay to light your hand on fire, if you have a nice poetic way of explaining it.
There are other equally unlikely developments in Me and You and Everyone We Know, I'll just list a few: six-year old Robby frequents internet sex chat rooms where he likes to write about poop; he arranges to meet a stranger at a park; the stranger turns out to be someone connected to the other characters; the young girl that lives next door to Richard and befriends Peter buys expensive home appliances so that she will have a "dowry" for her husband; Richard's co-worker has a sexually suggestive conversation with two teenage girls in the neighborhood and then posts signs on his living room window about the things that he wants to do to them; the two girls have an argument about who's better at oral sex and settle it by experimenting on Peter.
None of these incidents are entirely unbelievable, but they're all unlikely, and cumulatively they make Me and You and Everyone We Know feel false. I felt like I was just watching a lot of quirky behavior that was quirky for its own sake. I never came to a deeper understanding of any of the characters; they felt opaque from beginning to end. I couldn't tell you any more about them after the film was over than before it began.
The insidious thing about the quirkiness Me and You and Everyone We Know is that to many people it's judgment-proof. People just say, "Hey, it's quirky. So what? People do all kinds of strange things." My response is that art tries to engage with human experience, tries to say something, however small, about human existence. Observing behavior that is odd for the sake of being odd is one thing, but to pretend that it has something to say about human life is ludicrous. ¶ 8:10 AM
