Same

For the vast majority of junior high, I spent all of the time I wasn’t studying or preparing for my dreaded bat mitzvah at the house of my close friend Jeremy. Jeremy had a cutting-edge home camcorder, an impressive array of props and costumes, working parents who allowed us the run of the place, and an unflagging patience for the art of stop-motion animation. (I brought to the table free time and a willingness to go with the flow.) We made a music video for “These Boots are Made For Walkin’,” in which I lay down in the middle of a winter Chicago sidewalk and Jeremy meticulously inched a pair of his father’s shoes over my prostrate body. We made a music video for “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” starring a Disney figurine with mobile arms. There were other, more ambitiously narrative projects, but they were either failures or I blocked out the details, because I can’t bring them into focus now.

Shortly thereafter, during our freshman year of high school, Dawson’s Creek premiered on the former WB network, and, though we were into it, suddenly being a young aspiring filmmaker with an unhealthy love of the work of Steven Spielberg (guilty as charged) became something of a cliché. I moved on to other pursuits, like writing and having unrequited crushes on boys. Jeremy kept making movies, and we began to drift apart. Filmmaking faded into the background for me, but I remember those years vividly, eating frozen Snickers, drinking Diet Cokes, and very slowly moving the arms of a rubber toy to express the emotion in Tina Turner’s voice. While other people were starting to have relationships, starting to smoke pot, even starting to have sex, I was running in the other direction, back, into a world of filmic make believe.

I’m reminded of this because tomorrow two excellent, Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning movies will hit theaters, and they’re both about young filmmakers negotiating the world through the camera’s lens. As John Powers pointed out yesterday, Sundance, once a place for indie auteurs to tell boundary-pushing stories about grown-ups, is more and more a place for young directors to launch their careers with stories about even younger protagonists. What these two movies further show is that there’s actually nothing Sundance likes more than movies about very young protagonists who are themselves obsessed with making movies.

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Photo: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and based on the young adult novel by Jesse Andrews (he also wrote the script), tells the story of Greg (Thomas Mann), a socially maladapted teenager suffering through his senior year of high school in Pittsburgh. Greg’s mom (Connie Britton) is sweetly meddling, and his dad (Nick Offerman) is eccentrically nurturing (he seems to be based on Michael Douglas’s character from Wonder Boys mashed up with a kindly Dr. Evil), but they’ve given their son an appreciation for deep cuts from the Criterion Collection, and the long leash to pursue his singular love: filmmaking. Movies make up the whole of Greg’s existence: he wears Nosferatu and Film Forum T-shirts; his bedroom is covered in posters for Truffaut and Scorsese films; when he gets emotional, orchestral film scores swell up in the background of his voiceovers; and when the hot girl, Madison, touches his shoulder, he experiences it as an animated short in which a large quadruped pulverizes a small woodland creature with her hoof.

But most importantly, Greg devotes himself to producing elaborate spoof movies with his friend Earl (RJ Cyler), a process that involves “taking a film we like and making the title stupid.” These home productions, 42 in total, are actually sophisticated, Weird Al–style riffs on the classics: My Dinner with Andre the Giant; Pooping Tom, in which Greg wears a wig and is attacked with a plunger; A Sockwork Orange, featuring a sock puppet with a crazy resemblance to Malcolm McDowell; and, my personal favorite, A Box o’ Lips, Wow. (Say it fast.)

Though the concepts and the production values are high, and though each project even gets its own lovingly drawn cover worthy of an Olympia Le-Tan clutch, ultimately these films are sarcastically aloof, just one more of Greg’s extensive array of defense mechanisms, part of the same system that has him referring to Earl, clearly his best friend, as his “coworker,” or that sees him writing his college essay in the voice of Werner Herzog. The message is clear: I’ll reject you before you can reject me, and I’ll be really clever about it too.

All this of course changes when Greg meets the titular “dying girl,” Rachel (Olivia Cooke), his classmate who has just been diagnosed with leukemia, and whom Greg’s mom makes him befriend. Though they’re forced together by circumstance and parental decree, over the course of many afternoons hanging out and talking in Rachel’s decorative pillow-festooned bedroom, as Rachel loses her hair and grows more and more frail, they begin to genuinely care for each other.

But this is a movie that rejects formula on every level. So though Rachel is beautiful and smart and weird and likes Greg’s jokes and thinks his movies are cool, Greg’s voiceovers remind us again and again that this is not a typical Hollywood romance in which the doomed friendship turns into an uplifting love story. (I’m looking at you, The Fault in Our Stars.) Though there’s a prom plotline, and many meaningful snugglefests, and though Greg turns out to be a highly unreliable narrator, he is, at least on the surface, correct about this. We’ve got all the makings of a John Hughes movie: spunky, disadvantaged wise girl helps disaffected boy get all vulnerable. But then there’s the riff: Rachel is dying, and Greg, above all, probably really does just need a friend. (For the record: under the surface I’m still clinging to the idea that they’re in love!)

Seeing himself through Rachel’s eyes, Greg is able to overcome the boundaries of the formula he believes defines him: pasty, hedgehog-faced underdog doomed to live on the margins of society, producing snark and avoiding human connection. Rachel shows him, as cheesy as it sounds, how to become the director of his own life, the leading man rather than the sad clown, and, as a filmmaker, how to look past the surface to find stories that are more interesting, more complicated, more rewarding. In the meta narrative, that means that Greg makes a film that’s not at all pat or glib, something abstract and emotional and powerful enough to actually mean something (I’m being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers). In the master narrative, that means that Gomez-Rejon makes a movie that transcends its initial Wes Andersonian deadpan charms in favor of one that’s deeply emotional and gratifying.

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Photographed by Bruce Weber

While you may be thinking that Greg must be the biggest cinephile to hit big screens this summer, that’s only because you haven’t yet met The Wolfpack’s Mukunda. The story behind this film is almost too amazing to be true: in 2010 the documentarian Crystal Moselle was walking the streets of the East Village when she spotted a pack of six long-haired, black-suited, near-identical young men. She chatted them up and uncovered their crazy history: the six Angulo brothers, along with their sister, had grown up nearly completely cloistered in an apartment on the Lower East Side. Their father, Oscar, a Peruvian Hare Krishna afraid of the negative influence growing up in the big city might have on his kids, was effectively their jailor; their mother, Susanne, appears to have been subject to many of the same restrictions as her children.

In the near complete absence of contact with the outside world, the brothers watched hundreds of movies. Eventually, Mukunda, somewhere in the middle in birth order, began transcribing his favorites into scripts for them to act out and film. When we meet the boys the process has become very elaborate. Not only are many of them pretty good at acting—they do an uncanny imitation of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson cleaning up brains in Pulp Fiction—but they create incredibly realistic props: cardboard guns with removable cartridges, a Batsuit that might actually fool you from a distance, a Freddy Krueger get-up.

While all of the Angulo brothers are passionate about film, it’s Mukunda who seems to be a driving force behind their production efforts, and also behind much of the action of the documentary. Quiet, prone to speaking as though he’s reading from a pulpy film script, Mukunda internalizes the characters he transcribes from the screen, and frames his family conflict in cinematic terms. “After I saw The Dark Knight, that made me believe that something was possible to happen,” he tells the camera. “Not because it was Batman. It’s because it felt like another world. I did everything I could to make that world come true.” Playing these characters opens doors figuratively and literally. “I have to be as strong as I can be to play Batman,” he says, “because it’s a responsibility.” Eventually, that strength helps him to seize some agency in his own life, one day slipping out of the apartment in the first open act of defiance of his father’s rules. It opens the floodgates for the family, and most of Moselle’s movie is about their journey of discovering the outside world.

But it’s also about Mukunda’s journey as a filmmaker. The homages the boys create throughout the movie feel like film versions of folk art, transcriptions that are just as interesting and original as the originals themselves. Raised in isolation, the brothers have grown up into a rare breed: teenagers without edge. They may swear profusely, they may act out scenes from incredibly violent movies, but they are never mean. Protected from the world, they have not yet learned to take a defensive posture against it. There’s none of Greg’s world-weariness; the Wolfpack’s productions are utterly earnest.

By the end of the film, as Mukunda’s contact with the outside world increases—I’m guessing that observing Moselle, a working filmmaker, didn’t hurt—he moves beyond rehashing existing scripts to creating something truly original. The film we eventually see him working on is a literal evocation of the very personal experience of looking out a window and watching his emotions, personified by members of his family, from a distance. It’s an achingly moving image for what his childhood must have felt like, and the perfect real-life corollary to the project that the fictional Greg creates, also an attempt to capture on film emotions he finds difficult to express in person.

As both of these movies seem to say, hanging out behind a camera can be a way of shutting the world out, but it can also be a way of inviting it in.

The Wolfpack images:
Menswear Editor: Michael Philouze
Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick
Grooming: Thom Priano at Garren New York for R+Co; Produced by Elizabeth Murphy for Little Bear

The post The Wolfpack and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Are Kind of the Same Movie appeared first on Vogue.

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