Movie Tip of the Day: Me and You and Everyone We Know

It doesn't take much to impress me at the movies, yet so rarely do I go to the movies and walk out impressed.

When I go to the movies, I don't need to be wowed by the powers of technology. I don't need to be shocked by heavy-handed plot twists. I don't need to be amazed at the number of tears squeezed out of an actor earning 20 million dollars a film.

After watching Me and You and Everyone We Know I walked from the Cumberland Theatre to my apartment. I was more aware of everything around me: The pop can caught in the streetcar tracks, the light reflecting off the windshield of a parked green car, the maple sweet smell of crepes on the griddle.

The film's opening scene sets the tone. The likeable, good-natured, yet bewildered Richard who in the midst of a separation from his wife, walks into the front yard, raps on his sons' window, douses his hand with lighter fluid and sets it alight. With that, the film continues with a feeling of something big just under the surface. Something not quite right that's going to burst and end in disaster.

The characters are bizarre, but not overdone. They are people you'd like to meet and get to know, because you know you'd never be bored. They, however, are profoundly bored and can't figure out how to be happy. It's simple, caring, perverse, and heart-warming.

Reviewers have tended to make simplified connections to Todd Solondz and Larry Clark, but Miranda July's film is far more than that. While Solondz bruises you with twisted perverts and Clark remains the onlooker doing nothing while the bully torments, July's characters are empathetically believable. The tension (in this case, a potential for evil) is there; there's nothing sordid, nothing ruthless, nothing cruel. Me and You and Everyone We Know manages to delicately toe the line and at the same time call into question the line's very existance.

John Hawkes's performance is magnificent as the recently dumped shoe salesman. He interacts with his kids in the same way you'd navigate a bathroom floor after having dropped a light bulb. July's dorky loser charm (as the female lead) is sad, lonely, pathetic, and yet the audience can't laugh at her. She's too aware of her sad, lonely, and pathetic life, and we admire how well she's able to handle it. The kids fall nicely into my previously discussed non-cutesy-pie-suck-ups, but work to temper the madness of the adults around them.

So as I walked home it occured to me that the only thing that a movie has to do to impress me is to make me feel good. In the final scene, I was so intensely immersed into the film that I dreaded what I knew was the imminent rolling of the credits. To me, that's always the indicator of a good movie.