Me and You and Everyone We Know

There's a scene in Me and You and Everyone We Know, or more accurately a brief moment in one scene, that perfectly recreates an interaction I've had many times over the years with my own father. A Dad (John Hawkes) is watching TV with his two sons. The older child has his feet resting on a coffee table, and is jiggling his leg slightly, a slight sort of a nevous tic. The Dad, without even making eye contact with the boy, rests his foot against the kid's leg to make him stop shaking.

Film comedies, even great film comedies, rarely demonstrate that kind of careful observation of human behavior. And it's this hypersensitivity to the way people live day-to-day that really sets Miranda July's directorial debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know apart from other smart slice-of-life indie movies. In a beautiful film about humans and the way they interrelate, July takes a much-needed step back from irony or satire to simply capture the odd peculiarities of everyday existence in modern America.



Nominally a story about a recently-separated shoe salesman (Hawkes) and a lonely video artist (played by July herself) who meet and slowly fall in love, Me and You and Everyone We Know concerns itself mainly with the fallacy of loneliness in a world that's overflowing with other people. Characters are connected with one another in ways they would never imagine. And not bogus Crash-style inter-connectedness, based on coincidence and lazy, imploding narratives. Connected by boredom, by curiosity, by their fears and hopes. These are people who really have no business communicating in the sane world, except that they all think and behave alike.

Shoe salesman Richard has recently separated from his wife and the mother of his two children (JoNell Kennedy), who has left him for another man. His precocious kids (Miles Thompson and Brandon Ratcliff) live with him part of the time, in a tiny apartment. He meets artist Christine in the department store where he works, and though they seem to connect immediately, it will take the entire running length of the film for them to meet up socially for teh first time.

While those two crazy kids figure it out, we follow around a few of their neighbors. Richard's boys conduct a strange romance with a mysterious woman in an online chat room. July plays the sequence for laughs - particulary at the young Robby's innocent yet unsettling anal fixation - but ends the sub-plot on a tender (and almost romantic?) note that's bizarrely sweet. As well, Richard's neighbor carries on a hesitant courtship with some teenage girls by placing explicit signs in his window. Christine desperately tries to get professional attention for her humorously autobiographical home movies, but earns a living by shuttling the elderly around in her car. In the process, she aids an old man in romancing a dying woman.

But this is not a movie about incident. There are sequences that are highly cinematic - as in a pseudo-chase scene in which a plastic bag containing a goldfish flies between moving cars - but it's more of an exploration of the spaces in between people, the ways in which everyone reconfigures the world to suit their own personal needs.

In one scene, Richard confronts his soon-to-be-ex-wife about her nightgown, which is printed backwards allowing her to read an inspirational message in the mirror each morning. He's offended that the shirt is unreadable to anyone but herself, when other people around her have to look at it. She responds that it's for her benefit, and not his business.

Sometimes, the cognitive dissonance comes down to age. The bratty teenagers (Natasha Slayton and Najarra Townsend) try to seduce a lonely single guy at first as a prank, out of cruelty, but when he actually seems to return their affection, their curiosity gets the better of them. In another side story, a young girl attempts to make sense of the adult world by collecting kitchen appliances and linens - senseless "preparation" for a frighteningly unknown future.

But more often, everyone just feels emotionally isolated and disconnected, drifting around in a bubble of their own creation. Their attempts to cross over, to share their world with one another, tend to end, if not in sorrow, then at least in perplexed confusion.

The film opens with Richard's wife leaving him. He remembers, for whatever reason, his own father lighting his hand on fire momentarily with alcohol, as sort of a magic trick. He tries to repliacte the stunt for his family, either as an attempt to stall the inevitable or as some meaningful event to signify closure, and winds up burning his hand rather severely. His wife and kids don't understand the memory of seeing this stunt years earlier...all they see is a deranged man with his hand aflame.

Hawkes (whom I know as Sol from HBO's "Deadwood") does a wonderful job here. He spends essentially the rest of the movie recovering from this moment, not only in terms of his bandaged hand. The scene comes so early in the film, the audience reaction mirrors that of his family - we don't understand why he has just done such a recklessly stupid and crazy thing. He must just be some nutjob. Over the course of the next 90 minutes, Hawkes will manage to take a step back, and show us that our initial impression was formed while this man was at his worst, and that at his best he can be entirely reasonable and even sympathetic.

Only one small section of the film doesn't really work for me. The character of the museum curator who initially dismisses Christine's work (Tracy Wright) is pretty one-dimensional and vapid. She does get one of the film's most funny lines ("There wouldn't even be e-mail if it weren't for AIDS!"), her appearance in the film does feel a bit like the revenge of an artist whose work was overlooked for years. It's a rare false note in a film that's full of shrewdly observed vignettes.

The rest of the cast is entirely solid, particularly the two young actors playing Richard's kids. They are very natural together as brothers, which is crucial for a lot of their early scenes together to work. And Michael Andrews fleet electronic score is pretty terrific. It reminds me of some of Jon Brion's better work in films like I Heart Huckabee's.

This kind of iconoclastic, personal material can go, of course, horribly wrong. Without July's deft touch, clever and tight writing and ensemble of talented actors, a movie like Me and You and Everyone We Know could have been a forced, shrill and ego-manaical chore. You know, like Garden State. Thankfully, the film has been made with a steady hand (surprising from a first-time director), boundless energy and intelligence.