Coming off a spectacular opening at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year and winning the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the Audience Award for U.S. Drama, the movie Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has finally reached our shores.
Films that do well at film festivals don’t usually take off as well on the barren grounds of mainstream cinemas. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to watch the movie, much less watch it with a group of friends. Case in point, I walked into the cinema to watch the movie alone (the opening show, no less) to find myself in the cinema with the majority of ticket-buyers being solo and a mishmash of groups of people. I sat down at my seat only to listen with amusement two guys in front of me talk about how they would have come to watch this movie alone if it were not for the companion of the other guy.
Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and adapted from Jesse Andrew’s book of the same name, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a story told from the perspective of Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann), a high school senior who has a falteringly low self-esteem and an inability to trust people and make friends. Greg deals with high school in a listless and matter-of-fact way. He divides the high school population into sovereign states: the sports, the arts, the punk, the Jews etc., and manages to secure diplomatic relations with all of the groups, while not being a citizen of any state. Meanwhile, he and his co-worker/best friend, Earl Jackson (RJ Cyler), adapt movies from famous works into funny titles like A Sockwork Orange and eat in their history teacher’s room.
Greg fully intends to live out high school in that manner, until he finds himself forcibly tasked with befriending a dying girl, Rachel Kushner (Olivia Cooke), who is diagnosed with leukaemia.
This is the part where I meet a dying girl.
Now, before you dismiss this show as yet another sappy teenage romance movie, hear me out. The premise of this movie might strike as being similar to The Fault In Our Stars, however, I find this show being closer to The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This semblance is what I really like about this movie as it deals with deep issues like morbidity in a way that adults can empathise with, and at the same time, made so that teenagers can understand.
Gomez-Rejon cleverly avoids the lethargy usually associated with those issues by interspersing moments of intense drama with timely bursts of comedy. This would appeal to you comedy-lovers out there; it is as if you are being given a breather with every deep dive down the roller coaster.
Unlike The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which leveraged on the witchcraft sorcery of Emma Watson and demi-god Logan Lerman combined, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl features three relatively new voices, but stands in no way any lesser than the mythical duo of Watson-Lerman. Amidst the veil of softness and vulnerability, we slowly learn that Greg is made of tougher stuff than he believes. Even the initial mischievous demeanor of Earl is revealed to be a façade just so he can protect Greg’s vulnerability. Credit also has to be given to Mann who plays the strong dying girl with memorable moments of truth that really make me pause and ponder.
The movie dives deep into the themes of friendship and perseverance that go beyond the scope of teenage years. As lamented by Rachel’s mom in the movie, kids who go through such ordeals “grow up too fast” and there is nothing you can do about it. As a viewer, you feel that same inevitability as you sit through the show. You find yourself slowly coming to the realisation that as you watch Greg come out of his shell, you are doing the same.
With so many movies to choose from, this film might not be the first choice for mainstream movie-goers. However, I have to admit it has been a while since I walked out of the cinema feeling like I have left a bit of myself behind. So, allow me to deadpan one more time, this movie would be worth every twist and turn in your stomach.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl opens at the theatres on 3 Sep 2015.
Watch the trailer here:
