Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

An awkward high school student who makes spoof films is forced to hang out with a girl who has just been diagnosed with cancer.

The side of Hollywood that can genuinely make you laugh as much as it can make you cry. This is what I call a flawless Hollywood film! You may think my view is a tad bold, but hear me out. The narration, the characters, the utterances, and the actions are shown in the surrealistic way they loop in Greg’s mind. And who has never thought: “Oh, if anyone could see how I make sense of this world in my mind…” Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is Greg’s perception of his world as seen through his eyes, but if I were to be more technical, through Jesse Andrews’ novel/script and Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s lense.

There is a lot to pay attention to, but let me summarise my top details for you just to get an idea and maybe appreciate what I think deserves appreciation.

• The hilarious and inventive spoof titles include but are not limited to: ‘Anatomy of a Burger’ [Anatomy of a Murder (1959)], ‘Death in Tennis’ [Death in Venice (1971)], ‘Gross Encounters of the Turd Kind’ [Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)], ‘Raging Bullshit’ [Raging Bull (1980)], ‘A Sockwork Orange’ [A Clockwork Orange (1971)], ‘The 400 Bros’ (The 400 Blows (1959)].
• The extremely well-written dialogue and monologues are funny, dramatic, and/or both. They will make you laugh and cry separately and/or simultaneously.
• Thomas Mann (Greg), Olivia Cooke (Rachel), RJ Cyler (Earl), Connie Britton (Greg’s mom), Nick Offerman (Greg’s dad), Molly Shannon (Denise), and Jon Bernthal’s (Mr. McCarthy) performances are just beautiful!
• From a filmmaking point of view, when Greg’s mom initially tries to convince her son that he must hang out with Rachel, her endless, non-stop verbal diarrhoea is seen and heard uncut all the way from downstairs to upstairs till Greg slams the door shut. The continuation of her speech is accompanied by a continuous shot.
• Respectively, when Rachel makes the discussion about her treatment and discusses it with Greg (01:01:33 – 01:06:53), the five-minute shot remains uncut, not distracting the audience’s attention from the heavy accusations exchanged.
• But if we were to analyse the cuts and the montages throughout the film, I would conclude that they are there to visually explicate the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. For example, the editing controls the rhythm of the film by creating sequences of various paces, such as the introduction of the high school – narrated by Greg, the animation cuts that anecdotally appear out of nowhere and purely visually make the point they want to make, and the mixture of such sequences that constantly and meticulously regulate the comedy/drama balance.

In an attempt to avoid turning this review into an analysis, I’ll stop here and let you watch it. The aforementioned are merely examples that corroborate my point, but there is so much more that you will fall in love with. I will refer to this extended review in reviews of similar films that I will not say so much about. I am leaving such films for the end of the year as I have nothing negative to say, and they have impacted my expectations of cinema, raising the bar significantly high. Look out for similar reviews that I will upload in the following days. A film of the same level and category is The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). Again, this is what I see as Hollywood’s strongest suit.

It took me years to watch it again, and it evoked the exact same feelings as it did back then. I laughed out loud and burst into tears altogether. I hope you experience it the same way.

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