Jon Bernthal – Memphis Flyer

I have to admit I’m conflicted about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

On the one hand, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s debut as a feature director is genuinely fun. The film, which was based on a young adult novel by Jesse Andrews, who also wrote the film’s script, pulled off a rare feat earlier this year when it won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

The “Me” in the title is Greg (Thomas Mann), a film-obsessed teenager. High school is hell, of course, and by his senior year, he’s got his survival strategy well-figured out. He’s mapped out, in detail, all of the cliques and social groups, and has painstakingly maintained identities in all of them. He’s like high school Sweden: He has no enemies, but the cost of neutrality is a lack of friends. He won’t even admit that his actual best friend Earl (RJ Cyler) is his friend at all: He calls him a “co-worker”, because the hobby through which they have bonded is creating homemade parodies of classic movies. Their movies, which sport titles such as The Seven Seals, A Sockwork Orange, and Death In Tennis, bring to mind the “sweded” films of Michel Gondry’s 2008 Be Kind Rewind. The occasional glimpse of Greg and Earl’s work is just one of the fun formal tricks Gomez-Rejon plays.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Greg’s pretty content to drift through a life avoiding hassles; after all, who needs friends when you’ve got a killer Werner Herzog impression? But his ironic detachment hits an iceberg when his mother (Connie Britton) forces him out of his room to spend time with Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a girl in his senior class who has just been diagnosed with leukemia. Cheering up a dying girl is dangerously close to actual friendship, so Greg is reluctant, but Mom insists, and so he’s soon navigating past Rachel’s white wine-swilling mother Denise (Molly Shannon) to hang out with Rachel in her attic room.

This is only Gomez-Rejon’s second feature, after last year’s remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, but he’s hardly a greenhorn. He’s a veteran of TV’s American Horror Story and Glee who has worked as a second unit director for movies such as Argo. He guides Mann through a fantastic lead performance. The supporting cast is full of great turns, such as Nick Offerman as Greg’s Dad and Jon Bernthal as the tattooed history teacher Mr. McCarthy. Gomez-Rejon and Andrews adapt the novel’s first person perspective into a voice-over narration. Little stop-motion animation bits give insight into Greg’s state of mind as he and Earl set out to make a movie for Rachel, the filmmaking duo’s sole fan.

But about three-quarters of the way through the movie, I had one of those moments when you realize that, even though Ferris Bueller is a funny guy you’re supposed to root for, he’s also kind of a sociopath. For most of its running time, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is one of those movies where all of the other characters only exist to teach the protagonist a lesson. Earl is basically a Magical Negro character in the Bagger Vance mode. Rachel is only defined by her advancing illness. Viewing everyone around you only as a prop in your story is not only a bad way to go through life, but also bad writing.

Ultimately, I think the movie redeems itself. Its first-person perspective is in the first word of the title: “Me,” and the “Me” in this case is a clueless 17-year-old boy. In the voice-over, Greg outs himself as an unreliable narrator, and little details throughout the movie show that the people around him know that he’s being a jerk, even when he can’t see it himself. Rachel is ultimately revealed to be a much deeper person than Greg could see, and it’s Earl who finally delivers a much-needed gut punch to his friend. Gomez-Rejon and Andrews walk a thin line between deploying and subverting tired tropes, but their message is ultimately one of empathy, which makes Me and Earl and the Dying Girl worthwhile.

They don’t make ’em like Fury any more. Writer/director David Ayer has crafted an old-fashioned war film in the tradition of The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, and The Longest Day. But instead of John Wayne leading the 101st Airborne into bloodless battle, Ayer has Brad Pitt as Don “Wardaddy” Collier leading the hardened crew of the Sherman tank Fury through mud, vomit, and viscera.

Brad Pitt in Fury

The film opens in April 1945. The war is almost over, and even though Wardaddy has fought through North Africa to Normandy to Belgium and finally into Germany, he has only now lost his first crewman. Greenhorn Norman Ellison’s (Logan Lerman) first job is to clean his predecessor’s guts off of his seat, which tells you everything you need to know about the film’s tone. Norman is not initially popular with his new crew, earning the particular ire of Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis (Jon Bernthal), a tanker who has embraced the war’s horrors. Trini “Gordo” Garcia (Michael Peña) is the hard drinking Mexican driver, and Boyd “Bible” Swan (an unrecognizable Shia LaBeouf) is the tank’s fundamentalist first officer. There’s a war on, so their get to know you time is short, and they are thrust back into battle immediately.

Norman, who acts as the audience’s eyes and ears throughout the film, grows up in a hurry through a series of increasingly brutal battle scenes. There’s no quick cutting, handheld camera designed to disorient. Ayer builds and releases tension the hard way, with careful sequences that efficiently lay out who is doing what to whom.

Someone smarter than me said that Brad Pitt is a character actor trapped in the body of a leading man, but Fury may be a breakthrough for him — if one of the world’s most successful actors can be said to have a breakthrough. Wardaddy is clearly based on his character from Inglourious Basterds, but he’s not playing a Quentin Tarantino cartoon. As he calmly leads his tank through the carnage, he looks more comfortable in his skin than he ever has.

The ostensible theme of Fury is that war makes monsters of men, but it’s a prime example of Françios Truffaut’s observation that it is impossible to make an anti-war film, because movies make fighting seem like so much fun. You won’t see many shots as beautifully composed as Wardaddy, silhouetted by flames, fighting off legions of SS. But the film bogs down in an interminable second act set in a captured German village where the boys have to actually interact with (gasp) women. It’s fascinating to see how the archetype of the American soldier has evolved in the post-Full Metal Jacket era. Would you ever see John Wayne shoot a prisoner in cold blood? Would American soldiers gang rape a German woman in The Longest Day? But this is the 21st century, and maybe directors aren’t interested in, or audiences won’t buy, us as the unvarnished good guy, even when we’re fighting the Nazis. Maybe that’s why they don’t make ’em like they used to.