by Derek Smith 6/22/05

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Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone You Know has several things working against it - the recent overflow of quirky relationship comedies makes any new one appear suspect at best, July is a performance artist directing her first feature film, and the title is one of those catchy titles that many an indie flop use only because they can.  Instead of settling for simplistic "slice of life" formulas, she gives us a wide array of amusing, colorful yet confused and flawed characters and formulates a story that explores their inability to cope with the gap between their dreams and reality, their need for real human contact and the difficulty of fulfilling that need in the recent technological explosions in this digital age.  It is thoroughly modern in showing how technology has changed the way children behave and interact with one another and accepts and deals with, rather than criticizing, its presence.  The two young brothers, Robby and Peter (son's of the recently divorced Richard), enjoy creating images on the computer by repeatedly hitting certain keys to create patterns and eventually find themselves in a chat room engaging in sexual discussions.  The speed and ease of which this change occurs is unsettling, but it is also hilarious to see the huge difference between their experience with computers and the content it enables them to find.

Even more important than the impact of the digital age is how the characters attempt to connect to one another in such hyper-sensitive times.  In a state of rage one of the characters declares that without AIDS, e-mail wouldn't even exist since our fear of contamination wouldn't have gone off-kilter and while this should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, there is much truth in the fact that the physical and emotional distance in our daily communications has been growing rapidly over the past century.  But July isn't content to settle for this relatively simple observation and her characters, who are determined, naive and damaged yet optimistic, actively search for meaning and connections in turn providing us with a better understanding of them as individuals and the world they're trying to make sense of.  The precocious children and quirky central love story are a bit troublesome in the beginning, but unlike lesser indie fare, they are surrounded with more than enough substance to work.  Take the scene where two young girls offer to perform a "jimmy ha ha", as they call it, on the inexperienced teenager, Peter, so they can see who's better at performing the act.  The humor alone makes the scene successful, but July plays off of the awkwardness of the moment, framing Peter trapped by the pillow he was forced to cover his face with while the girls "educate" themselves.  The film is full of similar moments where characters communicate and connect in bizarre ways, which makes perfect sense since that is how July herself is communicating with us.  She walks a thin line between sincerity and pretension, but ultimately deals with enough issues head-on to make the occassionally excessive quirkiness forgivable.