Me and Earl and The Dying Girl (2015) Review

Can people really not overcome very minor social anxieties without somebody dying at the end?

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Pitched somewhere curiously between Diary of A Wimpy Kid, and Youth In Revolt — this dramedy teen coming-of-age somebody-dies flick fails to hit its mark.

It’s got some crap stop-motion animation, some exposition voice over and even some handy title-cards proclaiming “This is the bit where I have my first fight” etc. It’s not cute. It’s a mish-mash.

The thing about Greg is, he’s not likeable. Nor is he funny. Despite how many times he and his fellow characters exhort it.

The mix of utterly stereotypical American high schoolers he takes great pains to only slightly engage with aren’t funny either.

Nick Offerman, usually a class act, isn’t funny either as the “sociology professor” with a penchant for foreign films, not working and eating bizarre world cuisine.

Earl is Greg’s best friend, despite the fact that Greg doesn’t want to pitch it that way (yano cos’ he’s a bit kooky). Earl comes from the “tough part of town” two blocks away from Greg’s sociology professor dad’s house (who begins to look more like he might actually be on some sort of enforced leave from his post as the film goes on). It’s tough because Earl lives there with his brother and his brother’s dog. And they’re all black. Even the dog. Which makes them tough. And the neighbourhood tough. Because that really is about as complex as this film gets.

Other movie tropes we get to enjoy

• Greg and best friend fall out and make up again
• Greg and best friend accidentally ingest drugs ON A SCHOOL DAY!!!
• White kid wants to be a rapper, but everybody thinks it’s hilarious
• Black man sitting on a stoop in a vest smoking a ‘cigar’
• The loser gets asked to prom by the hot girl after he finally finds out who he really is
• Older woman coming onto the young male protagonist

Greg and Earl make movies it turns out. It takes about 30 minutes before we find this out. They re-make their favourites but with a slight pun on the title. It’s not funny. Some of the shots of their films are a little bit funny. But you feel that if the writer and director had actually made more than a couple of scenes of any one of these ludicrously titled movies (A Sockwork Orange?), it would contain infinitely more creativity than the film did.

So after a lot of shit we kind of learn that the whole point of this film. Greg who is terminally unable to connect with people for reasons we neither fully learn or care about (he’s got a fucking storybook life, mother, father, only child and everybody in the family loves and supports him — compare this to Rachel’s alcoholic, sexually predatory mother and absentee father and you lose even more sympathy for the witless prick) learns, thanks to the dying Rachel, that maybe he needs to put himself out there a bit more.

Well excuse me if all that just doesn’t sound worth the sucker punch of having the girl die of Leukaemia. Oh and spoiler alert, she does die, despite what the protagonist voices over for the entire film.

Maybe she could’ve just had a chat with him?

Can people really not overcome very minor social anxieties (he wasn’t depressed or anything at the beginning of the film; we don’t open with a shot of him dangling from a rope as Nick Offerman desperately tries to take his weight and cut him down at the same time) without somebody they didn’t know existed becoming really close to them inside a couple of months and then totally unsurprisingly dying at the end?

I’d like to hope that isn’t the case or the next series of the Undateables is going to be a bit dark.

And the final act did pack a bit of a punch — I think that’s what annoys me the most. Rachel was a sympathetic character.

What was wrong with teen films where nobody dies?

I think we all learnt some pretty impressive life lessons from the Goonies and The Mighty Ducks. Fuck, even The Breakfast Club. Over the course of a single Saturday the gang in that film really grew. Molly Ringwald didn’t have to announce she had cancer and then check out by the middle of act 3.

It’s such a cheap-shot emotional punch to have a teenager dying of an incurable disease. And it might be a cheap shot I could take if the entire purpose of having this girl die of cancer wasn’t simply so our fuck-wit of a protagonist, Greg, could come out of his shell, a bit.