“ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW” (2005)

Starring: John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon, Carlie Westerman, Brad William Henke, Natasha Slayton & Najarra Townsend
Written & Directed by Miranda July

Polly Staffle Rating: ****

Of all the crap we are taught as children and teenagers in schools, we are never educated about some of the most useful topics. More important than what color Mars may be, what the square root of pie is, or any of the truths and lies about the past they taught us, are relationships. Nobody ever teaches how to build a strong relationship and what will make it last. That's just something we're supposed to know or figure out on our own. Most people never do. They then have children and bring them into a dysfunctional, broken family. Those children are then expected to know how relationships work. They're supposed to know how love works. But nobody knows how any of it works and that's why we all are just feeling our way through life just like the characters in Miranda July's hilarious debut film “Me and You and Everyone We Know.”

This is the funniest movie I have seen in a long time. Part of what makes it so good is the truth it shows. It deals with a number of issues that some may be offended by like teenage girls Rebecca and Heather experimenting with oral sex and wanting to lose their virginity to an older man, a seven-year-old boy Robby talking about sex and meeting an internet stranger and a teenage boy Peter's strange fascination with a preteen girl Sylvie. I may have lost some readers with that last sentence, but trust me - no movie is more genuine and even sweet at times dealing with topics like these.

This is an extremely impressive first film for a director. Miranda July also wrote and stars here as Christine. I have my suspicions Miranda's character is very close to how she is in real life. Christine is an artist that creates pieces about relationships. When the film opens she is shooting a still photograph with a video camera and dubbing dialogue over the image speaking, for both the male and female. Christine is a caring person. She works as a driver for senior citizens and doesn't just chauffer them around, but gets involved in their lives. Her story is linked together with a slew of others.

The Swerseys - Peter (Miles Thompson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) - are the other big puzzle piece interlocking the film's stories together. Their dad Richard (John Hawkes) is separating from their mother. Their story connects with Christine's when she takes one of her elderly clients to buy a new pair of flashy Nikes at the shoe store Richard works at. Something about Richard draws Christine in and she basically ends up stalking him. The couple shares a couple of great cinematic moments together as they slowly fall in love. Their scenes together are as awkward as they are graceful, giving them a real feeling unlike cheesy romantic Hollywood films like “The Notebook.”

Richard recently moved into a small dump of an apartment next door to his thirty-something single coworker Andrew (Brad William Henke). When Peter and Robby stay with their dad, they share a small room and spend most of their free time playing on their computer, mostly chatting with weirdoes on the internet. Their father is uninvolved in their life. It's not that he doesn't want to be, that's just how it is. When he enters their room, Peter and Robby appear to be innocently working on one of those old computer drawings out of a book where you use dashes, comas, periods and asterisks to create an image. As soon as he leaves the room, they are back to chatting about “bosoms” and poop. It appears they use creating images as a backup to keep their dad in the dark about their internet encounters, but I think they make them for the same reason as the sex chats - to kill boredom.

This scene reminded me of my brother and me when I was eight or so. Not because we chatted about sex on the internet, but because we would use our grandmother's computer to pass the time when we spent the night at her house. This would have been in the early eighties when home computers weren't as common as they are now. The CPU was contained inside the keyboard and you saved your data to audio cassette tapes instead of the hard drive, floppy discs or CDs. When my grandmother bought her computer from Radio Shack she didn't purchase the storage device. My brother and I would spend hours typing in stupid computer programs from a book she had. After several hours of entering the programs, we would then get to play some lame game like a text driven basketball game or Russian Roulette. The games were pretty boring and didn't entertain us for long and as soon as we turned the computer off all our hard work was gone. There was no internet then, but had there been, I am sure we would have got into all kinds of things we shouldn't have. Years later when I was in junior high we bought a modem for our Commodore 128 and got into as much stuff we could through local bulletin board systems. I bring this up because that's what kids do. They get into things and when they don't understand a certain subject they are attracted to it because they are humans. Like sex, for example, they expose themselves to it and fill in the blanks with their imagination. That's what children of this film do with hysterical results. Can parents who can't teach or show by example how relationships work be expected to talk to their children openly about sex? Probably, but it doesn't happen.

Robby gets hooked on chatting and even does so later at what appears to be his school library. He's not the best typer since he is only seven, but he is smart and makes his way around instant messages by copying and pasting words and phrases. As Robby's obsession leads him to meeting face-to-face with his internet friend, his brother Peter has a sexual encounter with Rebecca and Heather, who are normally mean to him. The girls are curious as to which is the best at giving oral sex and decide to test it out on Peter. They began to wonder because of Andrew. He talks a big sexual game, but appears to be fairly inexperienced. Heather and Rebecca meet Andrew while waiting for the school bus outside his apartment. He begins putting up dirty messages in his window for them to read each day before and after school and one day he notes how he wishes the “tall one” - Heather - should perform fellatio on him.

Meanwhile, Peter begins to hang around Sylvie, who is closer in age to his brother. She is obsessed with wanting to be an adult, more specifically a loving mother. She wants to be the mother she doesn’t have and shower her daughter with love and everything she needs. Sylvie reads sales ads and looks for the best buy on home appliances to add to a hope chest she has filled with items she plans to share with her family. Perhaps Peter has the same dream of a picture perfect life and is drawn to her because of that.

Regardless, no matter how creepy some of the encounters may sound as you read this, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” has a big heart and is filled with scenes that if done wrong would be very painful to watch. The MPAA gave it an R-rating and says it contains “disturbing sexual content involving children.” That's pretty harsh because it really isn't disturbing in any way. Luckily Miranda July loves life and isn't a miserable person that hates the world like Todd Solondz. I mention Solondz because this is almost a better version of his film “Happiness.” There’s not a cruel moment in this film.

Like the low-tech computer images Peter and Robby make using symbols, life would be so much easier if we were provided the proper instructions. When the duo made an image using directions in a book, it came out actually looking like what it was supposed to be. When Peter makes one up as he goes along, it comes out as a jumbled mess. That's what this film is about. It's about blindly making our way through life. No one can hand out directions on relationships and explain life and love because we are all in the same boat. That’s what makes this such a great film that truly is about “Me and You and Everyone We Know.”

- CCF, April 2006