31 December 2008
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
I NetFlix’d this movie because of a Miranda July story Eugene made me listen to on Selected Shorts while we were driving back from New Hope a couple weeks ago. The story is “Roy Spivey” and is about a quirky woman who sees herself as a pushover, and as such, finds herself next to a famous actor whom she calls Roy Spivey to conceal his identity due to the torrid nature of their respective quirkiness. I remembered the movie because my friend Nina said she had seen it at the IFC Center when it came out, and liked it.
It seems like there should be a subgenre for movies with this kind of tone. It’s very specific but difficult to explain (IMDB’s plot keywords lend little help, ranging from “Self Mutiliation” to “Title Spoken by Character“).. It belongs right alongside I Heart Huckabees, and while tonally they are almost identical, it’s very easy to see Me and You and Everyone We Know as the completely-better of the two.
You have to accept the grating cuteness of this type of story, because it manages to have some pretty well-defined moments in it, like when Robby and Nancy are sitting on the park bench next to each other, and there’s this huge chasm of understanding between the two — in terms of what’s imaginable to a young boy, and what’s sexual to an adult. These are the moments where I was bowed over by the insights one can get at when viewing things through the lens of an outsider, even if it is so inherently “cute,” which is about the only way I can think of to describe it. There’s an appreciative level of reality that Miranda July has a handle on that David O. Russel does not, though.
Compare the “cuteness” of Richard and Christine’s life together while walking out of the shoe store past Ice Land to Richard’s behavior once they end up in a car together. Immediately you’re thinking you’ve entered into la-la land and then the hammer falls down, which allows you to empathize with the characters and their fleighty ideas about themselves (particularly Christine) versus feeling that they’re entirely constructed to be innately “cute” and “Other”. This is the opposite of what happens in I Heart Huckabees when Mark Wahlberg and the Rushmore-kid end up having dinner with a family and arguing about oil. There the movie is so in love with the meta- cute- never- happens- in- real- life- but- what- if- it- did- no- really- what- if quality that it sacrifices all believability and loses its ability to attach to anything genuine.
I also haven’t seen a movie that uses technology so effectively (and “contemporary art” so poorly, I might add). The scenes where Robby is instant messaging things he doesn’t really understand are a great example. Robby’s parroting of ‘truth’ by cut & paste is outrageous, and the fact that the movie introduces it because he types so slowly makes it all the more effective when it pays off. The contemporary art angle, however, is outrageous in a completely bad way. Sure, Christine makes art. And video art (sculpture?) at that. (Caveat: All things I’m predisposed to hate.) But can anyone actually imagine that video of her and Michael doing that video eulogy as anything even approaching art? The beach-sunset mono(dia?)logue at the beginning was more believable and intriguing as art than that video of them talking along to the picture at the end. The movie decides it’s better to show them making Christine’s art as more emotionally prescient than the art itself. But then it shows the making-of the art as the art in the gallery and completely loses all of its credibility as far as reality goes (Eugene notably points out that this meta-art answers the exact questions the curator was asking in the beginning of the movie, and that it’s stupid to assume that this is the only piece she has in the show. But if you ask me…) It loses the emotional impact because its taking a short cut (i.e., showing the making of the art, properly eulogizing Ellen and then showing at the same time that this is the art that got Christine into the exhibition).
Finally, setting the two boys up as fans of ASCII art made the “people as pixels” thing pretty insightful, and the fact that it seems to reference Harry Lime (intentionally or not, I’ll admit) made it all the more effective in terms of showing these kids as same/different/isolated/included/adrift/anchored and whatever other kind of dichotomy you can think of that seems to address the growing affect of technology in mapping the widening the distances between us-as-people looking for meaningful ways to connect with one another.