Gomez-Rejon: Me & Earl & The Dying Girl (2015)

Now that virtually every student at virtually every level of education has a SmartPhone, the actual physical enclaves that once defined high school America no longer exist in quite the same way as they did in the pre-digital era. Once upon a time, teen films were obsessed with determining exactly what was outside, alterior or subcultural to high school infrastructure, begging the question of what exactly happens to those films in an era in which actual physical space ramifies less and less. Released to widespread acclaim at the 2015 Sundance film festival, Me & Earl & The Dying Girl provides one answer to that question by way of a premise so elegant in its inversion of expectations that it’s strange that it hasn’t emerged before: a character whose main high school trauma is fitting in everywhere, and accomodating himself to every adolescent subculture imaginable. In Gomez-Rejon’s film, that character is Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann), a senior at Pittsburgh’s Schleney High School who’s managed to turn assimilation into an art form, moving from goths to jocks to nerds with only one mantra: “never commit to an interaction that won’t be mellow.” In an older film, he might have come off as either ingratiating, comic or psychotic, but here the various demographics of Schenley seem to have been somewhat mellowed in advance, with Gomez-Rejon employing a combination of whip plans and surveillance-camera perspectives to give an unsettling sense of everyone being even more firmly cemented in their place than ever before, but without any sense, awareness or even desire for mobility, let alone any conception of an alternative space to motivate mobility in the first place. Within that odd zone – agoraphobic and claustrophobic at once, with even the most countercultural voices somehow complicit in the deadening ambience of it all – Greg fits in more than any other character in the film, even if complaining about being an outsider is a critical part of what makes him fit in: after all, there’s the finest of lines between fitting in nowhere and fitting in everywhere, as Gomez-Rejon’s odd reinvention of Wes Anderson as a prison architect makes so unsettlingly clear. On the face of it, Greg’s cinephilia promises to provide some reprieve from the oppressive ergonomics of his day-to-day school life, but even there the film plays as something of an object lesson in how boutique DVD culture has destroyed cinematic subculture, since the closest thing Greg has to a friendship – with fellow movie buff Earl (Ronald Cyler II) – comes from refilming cult classic after cult classic with the same dexterity he moves from group to group at school, putting a twee, cutesy, unbelievably precious spin on even the most alienating, outrageous or affronting films as if in search of something that will genuinely alienate, defy and exlude him. Perhaps that’s why there’s such a fascination with Werner Herzog, and with Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, since there’s something about Herzog’s use of cinema as a limit-experience that’s totally unavailable here, in what finally feels like post-twee more than twee, just because twee is now the only option, rather than one style among many. If there was ever a debut aiming for the Criterion Collection, it’s this one, right down to the Brian Eno tracks that pop up at every juncture – nearly every track from Another Green World gets a look-in – as if Greg and Gomez-Rejon were both curating their own unbelievably precious Music For Films. Within that adolescent and cinephilic world, choice is everywhere, but difference doesn’t seem to exist – until Greg’s parents get a call to tell them that one of his many acquaintances has just been diagnosed with leukemia. From that point on, sickness becomes something like the last high school subculture, as well as providing a new kind of immediacy to Greg’s cinematic projects, as he collaborates with Earl to create a new kind of film for Olivia (Rachel Kushner), whose very presence seems like a novelty in a world of endless acquaintances, a world in which digital and real-time friends have more or less merged. Whether or not you find that use of sickness somewhat distasteful, it does provide a fascinating example of why a book and film like The Fault In Our Stars has gained so much high school traction, as well as providing some good opportunities for Greg and Olivia’s parents – played by Connie Britton, Nick Offerman and Molly Shannon – to shine, if only by channelling an older cinematic charisma that is totally outdated here. It’s somewhat predictable, then, that neither Greg not the film are finally up to the genuine otherness, alterity and difference that slowly but surely devolves the film into drama and even high melodrama, with the more “serious” moments almost ludicrous in their heavy-handedness, especially compared to the light touches of the wonderful opening act. And yet that failure is also what makes the film unique as well, conjuring up a high school world that can’t quite maintain comedy any more but also can’t deal with seriousness either, caught in the odd limbic ability to be all things to all people that Greg never fully or finally escapes.