If Me and Earl and the Dying Girl were a person, I would wrap my arms around them and squeeze as hard as I could. Based on a single viewing, this is one of the most affecting and lovely films I’ve ever seen. It’s funny, sad, touching, and profound. It also subverts almost every expectation while reinventing tropes I’ve seen a million times, making it that much more unpredictable and moving.
Greg, an awkward high school senior, interacts in the safety of his empty social cocoon and befriends a girl with leukemia. He has attributes which I see in myself: awkwardness, unattractiveness, complete ineptitude in interactions with girls, and an illogical head-over heels love for cinema.
I adore the moment where Greg — who makes terrible homages to classics like Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange, and Breathless (and many, many more of my favourite movies) — is in his room directly above where his parents are fighting about his grades and the fact that he won’t be admitted into college the following year.
Greg has spent so much time with Rachel, the titular dying girl, that he has done “literally zero homework” all year. Like it’s a drug, Greg injects himself with a dose of Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows, escaping to another world of sadness to express his emotion and frustration. I don’t know about you, but I’ve done that.
There are many moments where the film calls attention to its construction by having Greg narrate a contrast between this movie and a conventional Hollywood one. For example, when he and Rachel begin to have some chemistry, he breaks up the moment by saying, “so if this was a touching romantic story, our eyes would meet and suddenly we would be furiously making out with the passion of 1,000 suns. But this isn’t a touching romantic story.”
This approach is often very funny, but more importantly, it serves the story by creating an ironic distance that Greg not only creates between himself and the other characters, but also the spectator. As Greg learns to open up to those around him, the narration also becomes less self-reflexive and more of a tool to express emotion.
When Greg tells us that the movie we’re watching won’t end with Rachel dying because it’s not that kind of low-level film, it is like a defence mechanism against the audience judging him. So in the end, once his arc is complete, the film allows itself to go into more conventional story beats (albeit in a different way from what you’ve seen) because Greg is no longer hiding behind his pretensions.
This approach is so apparent in the final scene that it seems almost ripped out of the film Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close. What ends up separating this film from more gooey manipulation is that it uses these tropes to tell us something about the character.
Greg is unlike the teen-movie protagonists to whom we’ve become accustomed. He doesn’t drink. He’s not trying to lose his virginity. He doesn’t do drugs, although he does once accidentally. He’s not obsessed with finding a date for prom. He’s not a jock, a nerd, a geek, a bookworm, or any other stereotype. He is clunky and unrefined. He says excruciatingly stupid things yet still remains entirely endearing to us because we could see ourselves acting that way — in fact, most of us probably have.
