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Me and You and Everyone We Know
We have a whole life to live together you fucker, but it can't start until you call.
You know, I liked this movie, but it also came treacherously close to depressing the hell out of me. When I can picture myself in the place of the majority of the cast, a cast which on the whole, is not balanced; I come close to tears. Hell, I could relate to the pet goldfish in a bag left on the top of a vehicle by a careless father. The poor thing, trapped in such a small environment, suffocating, overlooked, jostled from place to place, eventually dying and then forgotten about soon after. Well, not forgotten by me, I obsessed over that damn goldfish, obviously. There's something really sad about being able to describe your life with a goldfish metaphor, but when you add an unsuccessful artist looking for attention and love; you might as well velcro fins on me and throw me off the trunk of a car (while videotaping it and dubbing it using my own voice as the thoughts of the goldfish). I've actually heard the goldfish scene described as comedy and truthfully, those people can blow me. It was allegorical, dammit, not mad-cap. Me and You and Everyone We Know is really about the plexus of human emotions and actions and their effects on each other, whether accidental or purposeful. It's about the struggle for connections and meaning in one's life; the six degrees of seperation between you and the guy you see waiting at the corner every single day. Yet in an odd way, it's extremely isolating. Loneliness in disc form (or DVR form, in my case).
So now I get to explain the convoluted plot which contains roughly a dozen people. At first glance, you may think the film is about two people. Richard, a father of two, who is recently separated from his wife and really, not all that close to his children. They are almost like small strangers living in his house. (The ex-wife played a significantly smaller part than I originally thought.) Then there is Christine, a performance artist, whose income comes from carting old people around instead of from her art work. Although you can assume these two will get together, it's really the journey of the people whose lives they touch that tell the story in this movie. It's about the old man, who after 70 years, finally found someone he truly loves. It's about the weird, fat guy who takes to hitting on two teenaged girls through explicit notes taped to his living room window. But, as I said, it's not all about connectiveness, it's also about lack of interaction between the characters. As much as Richard tries to be there for his kids, both end up in some sketchy situations that might have been prevented otherwise. Although I will admit, kids can get away with things while you're sitting in the next room. They're like asshole-y ninjas. Christine struggles with the aloofness of the curator in a contemporary art museum when she is trying to get some recognition over her hard work. To be honest, the curator is a total twat anyway and I wanted to punch her for standing with her arms across her chest and her head tilted when looking at an art slide. Yeah, yeah, you're pretentious, we get it. However, you have an "I have cat-ittude!" mug which automatically negates any of the previous pretention. I think my mom has a similar mug, for cripes sake. While I normally hate children in any form, in this film, Richard's younger son, Robby, completely made my day. When he says, in earnest no less, the lines "I want to poop back and forth." and "Like I'll poop into her butthole and she'll poop it back.. into my butthole and then we'll keep doing it back and forth. With the same poop. Forever." to an online "friend", I nearly choke with laughter. Damn, that kid is such a charmer. I only hope that one day, someone romances me with such words. The eventual outcome of the chats actually made me supremely uncomfortable, even though I mostly expected the exact scenario as soon as the online "friend's" user name popped up on Gaim.
There is a theme other than human relationships though and that theme is art. Art is personal and expressive and cathartic, stifling and unapologetic. Tolstoy claims that art should unite people, but I think it's just as likely to cause division. In any case, almost all of characters in Me and You... are performing some sort of performance art. In the opening scene, Richard, in a grand scene of desperation, lights his own hand on fire. When the old man, Micheal, loses his new love and expresses his grief over never being able to show her the world; Christine helps him "travel" with his love, through use of voiceovers and a projected photograph of the woman's daughter in front of some ruins. I guess it's a touching way for him to live vicariously through Christine's installation, while also showing us that she managed to get her "art" displayed in the museum.
The entire movie was rather dreary and didn't actually advance much further than from where it started, but the journey was mostly enjoyable, although slightly disheartening. I think this movie really just showcased how, um, odd Miranda July (the actress who played Christine and the director/writer) probably is in her everyday life. While I consider myself an artist, I must admit, I never really understood the intentions of performance artists such as Ms. July. I'm not saying her work is any less valid and I certainly wouldn't call this film pointless, but I do wonder if there is a different story in her. I mean, will she be able to repeat her reported success of this film with another? Will the theme be identical? I wish her luck and merely hope her quirkiness is not one-note. Oh, just watch the damn movie.
3.1 / 4.0
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