Originally published 8/3/2005
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Director: Miranda July
Writer: Miranda July
Producer: Gina Kwon
Stars: John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff, Carlie Westerman, Natasha Slayton, Najarra Townsend, Hector Elias, Tracy Wright
The characters of Me and You and Everyone We Know don’t live in our world, but one which they have willed into existence for themselves. It’s a world where teenage girls develop strict and serious rules for a contest they want a disbelieving neighbor boy to judge, and where a father decides the best way to demonstrate love for his kids is to light himself on fire.
It’s odd and precious, sometimes maddeningly oblique and others enviably, touchingly direct. It has moments of the kind of beauty Keats wrote about, like the last minutes of life for a goldfish taken before its time but not alone in its passing, or the instant where a character realizes who that person sharing the park bench with them really is, and how the means by which they arrived here make perfect sense.
To make a connection in this world takes a kind of bending of vision – so you can show you appreciate the machinery behind someone else’s madness. Love in this world comes in that moment you realize someone else is insane in ways you can grasp and do something with.
Our most important connection happens in the shoe section of a department store. Richard (John Hawkes) is a recently-separated salesman fitting a pair of sneakers for an elderly gentleman (Hector Elias). The gentleman is accompanied by Christine (Miranda July), an Elder Cab driver whose job is not only to transport, but to take those extra steps to cater to senior citizens’ needs, including that for company. She’s a struggling artist who makes videos of still pictures with plaintive narration behind them, and can never find comfortable shoes because they all scratch her low ankles. Richard sees her ankles and unexpectedly blurts “You think you deserve the pain but you don’t.”
And this is the nature of the movie, in which an ensemble of characters variously burst forth with instinctive hope for connection than retreat behind private, seemingly arbitrary protective walls, exposing and hiding helplessly. The children are solemn, dedicating themselves to individual obsessions, and the adults are fearful and confused, because they’ve been doing the same for a long time now without anyone else understanding, and wonder if anyone ever will.
Richard shares custody of his two sons, the teenager Peter (Miles Thompson) and the six-year-old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff). At one point he asks them if he looks okay, that if he were some stranger and not their father they would judge that he looks in good health. The trouble is, he’s actually their father, and has no elaborate ritual or philosophy to help him fulfill that duty, so the children fend for themselves and forge some highly unusual friendships as they do.
Christine wants her work exhibited in a museum for contemporary art, but is stymied by Nancy (Tracy Wright), an exhibit director who mistrusts anyone naïve enough to try and get their work shown by walking into the museum with it. Nancy is lonely – she looks as if she is struggling to be the person she thinks her job requires her to be – so she occupies herself with spinning ludicrous theories about the popularity of e-mail, and wondering whether a sculptor stole her coffee mug to make art out of.
Then there’s Richard’s neighbor and co-worker Andrew (Brad William Henke), who calls the bluff of some teasing teenage girls (Natasha Slayton, Najarra Townsend). They call his bluff right back, and soon all three of them are nervously wondering just how far this thing can go and if any of them is capable of stopping it.
It’s not for everyone, the lengths to which this movie will tap experimentally at our taboos, but there is something strangely and disarmingly innocent about it. The more perilous it gets, the more safe you ironically feel. The movie weaves some gossamer barrier around itself and around pain – after the above-mentioned father has succeeded in igniting himself he doesn’t scream but instead stares at his burning hand, perplexed.
Nor is it for everyone how anecdotally it proceeds – the acting is mannered but always appropriate to the purpose and the movie’s technical accomplishments are slightly shoestring but effective enough, so if it seems in this review as if I am often left to simply list events and characters, it’s because it is near impossible to describe its charms without their contexts. And these contexts are at once absurdly complex and arbitrary but somehow graced with the perfection of accident.
Behavior in this movie is presented without judgment or need to explain itself; there’s something in the way Peter goes from making his bed with crisp military corners to letting it hang sloppily out, it’s left to us to decide what it means for him. And there’s something daring about the way in which 10-year-old Sylvie (Carlie Westerman) is the most precocious, well-spoken and forward thinking movie child you will ever see; but instead of becoming tiresome she wins us over with the clarity of her vision and her right choice about who to share it with.
Writer-director-star Miranda July is a performance artist herself and it gives an authentic intensity to the scenes where we watch Christine fumble towards her creative achievements – more admirably, she’s not presented as a genius but given room to mess up, be frustrated and improve. She has made a film that sometimes feels like an extended coffeehouse open mic bit, where the artist can’t help explaining what it all means as they go. Me and You and Everyone We Know is about that sort of poetic will, but more still, about the joy in seeing it has actually reached someone else. It’s the rarity of actual artistic communication which it celebrates, and how this is love, and also beauty, which makes its pontificating go down easier. When you can walk down the street with a stranger, tell them that the street represents their life together, and have them pick up the metaphor and expand on it exactly and with a playful smile, you’-ve found something special. This is a special movie.