Me and You and Everyone We Know

Halfway through Me and You and Everyone We Know, I thought I had it pegged down. I was wrong, and I'll explain why. But let me give some context first.

Sometime during the past two years, too gradually for me to pin on a specific date, I got bored with "indie" movies. Now, people can quibble a lot about the word indie, whether such-and-such movie really qualifies as indie or not when so-and-so actor worked on it and whatever studio distributed it, but I'm not here to get into credibility debates, which are pretty dull anyway. Moreover, the term indie has described so many different things over the years that it's basically meaningless as anything but a genre distinction. In 2013, indie isn't a studio, or lack thereof; it's a style. So when I say that I got bored with indie movies, what I really mean is that I got tired of romantic comedies whose primary emotions are ennui and sincerity, where the men are stammering and disaffected, and the women are outgoing and have eclectic hobbies, and the children are precocious, and the dialogue lets the audience know it's sophisticated because it references literature and uses the word "fuck," and everything about the cinematography and soundtrack is just a little too precious.

Of course, in addition to being a horrible trainwreck of a run-on, most of that last sentence reeks of an oversimplified view that dismisses a diverse collection of films made by hardworking, talented people. Not that such trends don't exist in certain brands of cinema (I'm pretty sure they do, and I am tired of them), but it's unfair and disrespectful to dismiss huge swatches of (mostly) American film output based just on aesthetic criteria. Plenty of good things have actually come out of this genre, and to tell you the truth, a lot of movies that I like quite a bit share many of those "indie" qualities I listed above.

Nonetheless, such was my mindset going into writer/director/actress Miranda July's 2005 film.

Here's the movie's synopsis on Netflix, which appears beneath its pastel-saturated poster: "Eccentric Christine seeks emotional connections in the modern world while newly single shoe salesman Richard copes with his recent separation and his teenage son experiences a sexual awakening." Quirky woman, disaffected man, precocious teen: indie flick, right?

Well, as it turns out, sort of. The first half of the movie or so didn't do a whole lot to change the impression I had gleaned from the cover and Netflix blurb. In its early goings, Me and You and Everyone We Know seems to aspire to a romantic comedy take on the Magnolia-style film that became popular around the turn of the new millennium, where casual acquaintance and synchronicity interconnect the lives of a large cast of characters. It would be cumbersome to describe the considerable number of characters and subplots in the movie (a cumbersomeness that Me and You avoids through clear and efficient storytelling, which itself should have clued me in that something special was going on), but the focus initially remains on quirky Christine (Miranda July) and sad-sack Richard (John Hawkes), which is what gives the movie such strong indie rom-com vibes early on. The two first meet in what I assumed to be a take on the typical "meet-cute," with a perhaps overly clever conversation on how the street signs mirror the relationship they might have together. Before long, the script gives the two a few more of these Holly Golightly-esque chats, and the movie is well on its way to indie-pop territory.

But then something happens in the final forty-five minutes of the movie that blew me away: Me and You and Everyone We Know ceases to aspire to indiedom and instead achieves the sublime. The film pulls away from the supposedly central romance and lets the rest of the characters' stories unfold in deeply human ways that push toward the surreal and the emotionally naked. For example, the beginning of the movie shows Richard's teenaged son, Peter, goofing around on an internet chat room; there he meets an anonymous user, to whom he describes, at the suggestion of his six-year-old brother, Robby, a practice Robby calls "pooping back and forth forever" (which is exactly what it sounds like). Robby then begins to log on to the chat room by himself and continue talking to the anonymous user (who has taken quite a liking to the idea of "pooping back and forth forever"). The movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of the situation, but the payoff of this subplot, when Robby meets the chat room companion (a thirty-ish woman who curates an art museum), is absolutely transcendent and indicative of the beauty this movie dishes out in its second half. When the two meet, there is no screaming or revulsion between the two, but instead a tender understanding and a completely non-ironic embrace. This ending somehow manages to frame the two as wistful lost souls finding peace (read: real human beings) without reneging on the movie's promise to deliver on the ick-factor and comedy of a six-year-old meeting a thirty-year-old with a fecal fetish for a blind date. These are two characters finding unexpected profundity out of a situation whose initial premise would have exploited their situation solely for comedy.

What's striking is that while nearly every character gains this profundity by the end of the film, often in equally bizarre ways that contrast the initial realist/indie aesthetic of the beginning, these resolutions never feel jarring or ridiculous. This won't make sense to anyone who hasn't already seen it, but that it doesn't seem out of place for a movie that begins with a marriage falling apart to end with the image of a child literally causing the sun to rise speaks to the astoundingly natural way that director Miranda July manages to transform the lives of her characters. This is the stuff of avant-garde cinema, grown like a weed out of conventional meet-cute scenes.

Upon finishing the movie, then, my question became: why start with the indie trappings at all? This is a movie that dresses itself up in indie pop sensibilities but by the end refuses to be pop in any sense of the word. Why even bother with all the meet-cute stuff at the beginning? The answer, I think, partially lies with a sympathy for the audience. You don't want to throw viewers into a world that ignores conventional rules of science and human interaction; no matter how beautiful the images you create, your audience will always be alienated without some kind of lifeline. The conventional human drama provides that lifeline. I'm thinking of Charlie Kaufman's great Synecdoche, New York, a movie I saw recently that reaches the same kind of avant-garde profundity at the end as Me and You. Synecdoche doesn't give off the indie rom-com vibes, but it still takes time to establish realistic character motivations and conflicts before diving into the stages-within-stages and actors playing actors.

But the more I think about the indie false start in Me and You and Everyone We Know, the more I think there's more to that story mode than just hooking the audience. And here's what I've realized: that was never the story mode it was trying to adopt. Only my expectations of the movie's plot set it up as such. I read the plot synopsis and heard the opening notes from the soundtrack, and I assumed I knew what I was seeing. Looking back at those first scenes, however, I realize that the surreal bent exists throughout the movie, albeit in a subtler form. If I'm not looking for a meet-cute, Christina and Richard's conversation about their prospective relationship is less cutesy and more just plain weird. Really, it's pretty strange that these two people just launch into the sort of conversation that contemplates their own mortality, just out of the blue, but it's right in keeping with the movie's ultimate bent on sublimity. Here are two characters passing the time by passing through time, stepping out of their own realistic situation into a metaphysical head space. I didn't notice this because I was looking for clunky artificiality of genre tropes instead of something with its own personality altogether. I put the conventions there by looking for them.

In short, it's unfair to a movie to judge it by its genre, especially since a lot of movies actual resist classification by genre.

And, well, that's all I've got. Sorry, it's another long post. Please don't hate me. Thank you so much for slogging your way to the end, and I'd love for you to share what you think in the comments. Readers are wonderful. Oh, and I promise I'll do a short one next time.

Until then.