Film review

Miranda July (2005)

I enjoyed the film on its original release but spent much of this repeat viewing wondering why.  Miranda July’s debut feature was shot in suburban Los Angeles and the DoP Chuy Chavez’s lighting emphasises appealingly bright, fresh colours:  red roofs; clear blue skies and sky blue trainers in the shoe shop where the main male character Richard (John Hawkes) is a salesman; a candy-striped top worn by the female lead Christine (July); the brilliant orange of a goldfish in a plastic bag of water.  Other aspects of that fish’s cameo illustrate why watching Me and You and Everyone We Know is often a pain.  Christine – an unsuccessful performance artist who pays her bills working as a driver for a firm called Elder Cabs (transport for geriatrics) – is in her car with a regular client, Michael (Hector Elias), when they spot the plastic bag containing the fish sitting inexplicably and precariously on the roof of another car travelling at speed.  The creature’s prospects don’t look good:  Christine suggests that something should be said to mark what may be its last moments of life and launches into an ontological burble, telling the fish that, if its existence is about to end, ‘I want you to know you were loved’.  (Christine and Michael then yell and point out to the couple in the other car their odd conveyance – you assume the fish survives.)  Me and You and Everyone We Know has an innocent, sweet-natured quality – reflected in Christine’s premature tribute to the fish as much as in the newly-minted look of the film’s world – but its title is a warning:  the calculated eccentricity of the characters that Miranda July has written, expressed in many of the lines they speak (there are several attacks of existential musing), soon becomes oppressive – as does Michael Andrews’s score, although it captures the moods of the story very appropriately.

Richard is recently separated from his wife Pam (JoNell Kennedy) and looks after his two sons, the teenage Peter (Miles Thompson) and the much younger Robby (Brandon Ratcliff).  Just as Christine wishes to commemorate the goldfish, so Richard, in the film’s opening sequence, feels compelled to perform a ceremony for Pam’s departure:  he pours fuel on his left hand and ignites it, forgetting, as he explains later, that he should have used alcohol instead.  (His hand is bandaged for much of the movie’s ninety-minute running time.)   Christine takes a shine to Richard from their first meeting, when she takes Michael to the shoe shop for some new footwear; she also takes to stalking Richard but in such an unquestionably kooky way that he can hardly take offence (although he does at one point).   Christine’s and Richard’s relationship is the main one in Me and You but there are plenty of others:  between Michael and the old woman (Ellen Geer) whom Christine drives him to visit in a retirement home; between Richard’s saddo work colleague Andrew (Brad William Henke) and two teenage girls, Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend), both keen to make a start on their sex lives but with more interest in Peter than in Andrew; between Peter and Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), a neighbour’s daughter, a pre-teen who’s already conscientiously assembling items for her hope chest.  There’s also an online relationship between Richard’s kids – eventually Robby solo – and an ‘untitled’ interlocutor, who turns out to be Nancy Herrington (Tracy Wright), the humourless boss of a contemporary art centre, to whom Christine sends her performance video when Nancy declines to accept it in person.  (The arty-farty satire – around found objects and so on – is pretty weak.)  Miranda July sees all these various relationships as based in need – usually, sexual need.  The people involved are presented as essentially innocuous even if they tend to make a mess of things.  (July also presents the minors as almost sadder and wiser than the adults.)

The effect of the juxtaposition of this innocuousness and the sexual explicitness of some of the encounters – a verbal rather than physical explicitness – is more queasy than amusing.  This is the case with the cyber conversation involving Robby, who, once he gets the hang of what his elder brother has been writing as ‘Night Warrior’, suggests ‘pooping back and forth’ to ‘untitled’ (who replies, ‘You are crazy and making me very hot’).  It’s also the case with the notes that Andrew pins to his window, telling Heather and Rebecca what he’d like to do with them (although he’s really timid and harmless).   In spite of all this, Miranda July and John Hawkes get some emotional depth into their exchanges:  the urgency and uncertainty that Hawkes gives Richard cuts through a lot of the grating tweeness.  I’d not seen Hawkes before I saw Me and You and Everyone We Know and I think he was the main reason why I liked it the first time.  Even if some of Miranda July’s other achievements here are questionable, she certainly helped to propel the career of a fine actor.

12 September 2014