Cancer friendship tale avoids easy path
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Rating: fffho Starring: Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Olivia Cooke Directed by: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon Running time: 105 minutes
With its tell-all title, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has the misfortune to arrive in theatres barely a year after the similarly themed The Fault in Our Stars. So what does this one have that the other cancer movie didn’t? Two words: Werner Herzog.
No, the eccentric German filmmaker doesn’t make a personal appearance. But teenage film buffs Earl (RJ Cyler), and Greg (Thomas Mann), the “Me” in the title, have a special affinity for his work. We see them at school watching Burden of Dreams, a documentary about Herzog’s epic Fitzcarraldo, and at home tucking into the director’s 1972 adventure Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Their film buffery extends to their hobby of making their own movies, playing off the titles of more famous ones. So we get The 400 Bros, Eyes Wide Butt, Senior Citizen Kane and Monorash, a play on Rashomon that involves a serial killer who’s got mono.
Better still, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon lets us see bits of the boys’ work, such as a scene from 2:48 p.m. Cowboy, modelled ever so tangentially on Midnight Cowboy. A quick camera pan across their shelf of home movies is itself worth the price of admission.
What else? Oh, right, a dying girl. She’s Rachel, played by Olivia Cooke, and moving up in the world since starring in last year’s lame board game/horror movie Ouija. And she certainly seems to be dying, although Greg swears up and down in voice-over that she’s not. Could be he’s in denial, or maybe he knows something. He also starts the film by telling us he once “made a film so bad it literally killed someone,” so I wouldn’t trust him too much.
In any case, he’s definitely right when he says there’s no romance between him and Rachel. Whereas The Fault in Our Stars was all about falling in love while fighting cancer, this one is really more about camaraderie and friendship. Pestered by his mom (Connie Britton) into paying a visit to Rachel, Greg asks if she’ll do him a favour and hang out for a while so his mom will leave him alone. It works, and they do become friends.
The adult cast is excellent and nicely underplayed. Greg’s dad is the always-watchable king of scruff, Nick Offerman. Rachel’s mom is Molly Shannon, surgically attached to a white wine glass and forever bumping against Greg and telling him how sweet and yummy he is. Ick, but funny.
Me and Earl won both the grand jury prize and the audience award at the Sundance festival in January, perhaps impressing viewers with its absences. On the negative side, it doesn’t feature very many camera lenses — 80 per cent of the film looks to have been shot with a wide angle.
But it also doesn’t take the easy way out, constantly reminding us that no one’s going to fall in love (except perhaps with the films of Herzog). As written by Jesse Andrews, based on his own novel, Greg and Earl are cast as extreme loners, although the friendship with Rachel makes them aware of the necessity of connecting with others. In the end, that’s more than enough.