ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL (12A)
4 stars
The good die young, and that seems to be the inevitable outcome of Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s beguiling and intensely moving screen adaptation of Jesse Andrews’ debut novel.
A teenage girl is diagnosed with cancer, classmates offer their heartfelt sympathy and one childhood friend sacrifices his studies to support her through chemotherapy.
There are obvious similarities to The Fault In Our Stars, but while that film had audiences sniffling from the opening frame, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl mines a rich vein of offbeat humour to stem the deluge of salty tears.
“This isn’t a touching romantic story,” confides Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann), the socially awkward high-school student and narrator of Gomez-Rejon’s remarkable film.
To some extent he’s right: there’s no boy meets girl cuteness here, no stolen kisses or wish fulfilment about the healing power of nascent love.
But his story is deeply affecting, recounted as a scrapbook of bittersweet vignettes and stop-motion animation, accompanied with self-explanatory onscreen captions like “Day 1 Of Doomed Friendship”.
At the behest of his parents (Connie Britton, Nick Offerman), Greg visits estranged childhood friend Rachel Kushner (Olivia Cooke), who has been diagnosed with leukaemia.
“I don’t need your stupid pity so please go,” she tells him coldly, but Greg persists to placate his meddlesome folks.
A faltering friendship takes root, to the delight of Rachel’s boozy mother (Molly Shannon).
In order to impress his high-school crush, Madison (Katherine C Hughes), Greg agrees to make a film for Rachel with his partner in creative crime, Earl (RJ Cyler).
They have been producing charming homages for years including A Sockwork Orange, Senior Citizen Kane and Anatomy Of A Burger.
The pressure to deliver a masterpiece weighs heavily on Greg, creating friction with Rachel, who doesn’t want to be surrounded by negativity.
“You can go back to your life of being invisible, detached and self-hating,” she sobs.
Me And Earl And The Dying Girl is a beautifully judged
rites of passage drama, that eschews mawkishness and emotional manipulation in favour of a richly detailed portrait of adolescent dreams in crisis.
Gomez-Rejon’s whimsical visual flourishes are a constant delight, perfectly reflecting Greg’s love of classic cinema and his penchant for homemade props.
The film is punctuated by numerous moments of unexpected humour, like when Greg says something thoughtless and insensitive to Rachel, and stares at a poster on her wall of a Hollywood hunk dressed as an iconic comic book superhero.
“I’m damned if I’m letting a punk like you waltz in here and stupid the place up,” growls the character disapprovingly.
Mann doesn’t strike a false note in the tricky lead role, gelling naturally with Cyler and Cooke.
“This isn’t a sappy love story,” Greg emphasises, in case we had forgotten.
No it’s something far more precious, fragile, haunting and life-affirming than that.
NO ESCAPE (15)
3 stars
East meets west and, as usual, America emerges as the culturally and morally superior force in John Erick Dowdle’s taut thriller set in Southeast Asia.
No Escape was shot on location in Thailand, but director Dowdle and his younger brother Drew, who co-wrote the script, remain vague about the geography of this violent, protracted chase set during a bloodthirsty coup.
A climactic sequence set on a river, which supposedly meanders across the Vietnamese border, would logically infer Laos or Cambodia as the backdrop to the wanton carnage.
Neither nation would want to be connected to the rampant xenophobia on display here, so the Dowdles dodge specifics, including the political motivations of their stereotypical characters, and focus instead on propulsive action sequences.
The opening 30 minutes are particularly nerve-racking, cranking up the suspense as a beleaguered American family plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with a machete-wielding rabble in a besieged hotel.
All of that sweat-drenched tension evaporates when flimsy threads of realism are slashed in hysterical fashion to engineer a series of hilariously improbable events that defy logic and the laws of physics.
Texan businessman Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) uproots his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and daughters Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and Beeze (Claire Geare) to take up a job in far-flung climes.
The welcome from some locals is lukewarm, so while Annie and the girls settle into the hotel suite, Jack seeks solace in the bar and attempts to justify his company’s presence to fellow traveller Hammond (Pierce Brosnan) and other patrons.
The assassination of the country’s president sparks an uprising and Jack witnesses firsthand the brutality of the mob.
He sprints back to the hotel and rounds up Annie and the children just as locals begin beheading foreigners in the street and storming the reception.
Staff stand by as international guests are slaughtered in their rooms.
“All we got to do is put 10 steps between us and them,” Jack tells his terrified family, shepherding them at speed through the mounting devastation, bound for the US embassy.
The odds are stacked against the Dwyers and no one, it seems, can be trusted.
No Escape is punctuated by moments of jaw-dropping incredulity, including Brosnan’s broad cock-er-nee accent.
Wilson and Bell are an appealing on-screen couple and they wring droplets of sympathy for their stricken parents, especially when little Beeze shows scant concern for everyone’s safety by constantly complaining that she is hungry, wants her teddy or needs the toilet when silence would be golden.
Dowdle orchestrates the fast-paced set pieces with a modicum of flair, stampeding any half-hearted attempts at cultural sensitivity under the feet of his nameless revolutionaries, who intend to repel western capitalism with barbarism and brute force.