The much-lauded Me and Earl and the Dying Girl won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.
With a cast of quirky, wise-beyond-their-years teenagers playing alongside parents and teachers who verge on the comically absurd, Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon manages to reign in the allegory and tell a fairly straight-forward story about the friendship between Greg, a dorky high school senior, Earl, his film making buddy, and Rachel, a girl in his high school year who is diagnosed with Leukaemia.
It’s a tear jerker but a clever one. There are strange details that weave into the tapestry and make it less of a Fault in our Stars and more of a Scott Pilgrim vs The World.
This coming-of-age film bears a few disturbingly Wes Anderson-like hallmarks at the outset but then finds its own way with stop motion sequences that are genuinely original. The real highlights are the spoof films made by Greg and Earl with titles like ‘A Box O’ ‘Lips. Wow’, a play on Apocalype Now, or ‘A Sockwork Orange’ where Stanley Kubrick’s characters in A Clockwork Orange are played by sock puppets.
The side characters of Earl’s pho-obsessed history teacher and weird foods of the world obsessed sociology professor father add colour to an otherwise simple tale.
With some solid gags, creative cinematography and moving moments that don’t push emotional buttons too ham-fistedly, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has plenty to delight.
