Pittsburgh. Teenagers Greg and Earl go through life in a daily routine, all until Greg's mom informs him that his high school acquaintance Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia. When his mom persuades him to spend some time with Rachel, Greg reluctantly agrees, but gradually begins to like hanging out with Rachel. Since Greg and Earl made over forty short films spoofing film classics, Rachel's friend Madison talks them into making a movie about Rachel. Rachel is diagnosed with cancer, but refuses further chemotherapy after she loses her hair and feels even worse. Greg and Earl fight and separate. On prom night, Greg drives to the hospital to show Rachel the movie he completed for her, but during the screening she falls into a coma and dies. Later, Greg finds out Rachel wrote a letter to a college to try to persuade them to accept Greg as their student.
Excellent drama-comedy "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" is all the more wonderful and humorous considering its depressive subject. And yet, such a depressive subject would have probably fallen into intolerable melodrama hadn't it been presented in a humorous way like this. The film tackles that unpleasant topic many people will experience at least once in their lifetime—that feeling of helplessness and despair when a person they know is slowly dying from a terminal illness—yet screenwriter Jesse Andrews and director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon craft such a wild concoction of positive energy through wacky jokes, director's intervention or comical dialogues that it all gradually becomes a celebration of life. Its quirky style reminds initially of W. Anderson, yet it slowly becomes much more humane and character-driven. The whole film is filled with an endless amount of creative ideas and dialogues. In one sequence in high school, for instance, Rachel is comforted by her friends when she receives test results for her illness, yet Greg, passing by, just hears the word "test" and nonchalantly says: "Tests? I've been there!", and after realizing what the context was, he later remorsely says to himself: "I'm like innovatively stupid."
While trying to cheer Rachel up in her room, Greg feigns how to get out of boring conversations with people by playing dead, yet then he looks at a poster of Wolverine hanging on her wall and imagines hearing the voice from said poster accosting him for inappropriate behavior towards a cancer patient. Greg often breaks the fourth wall, whether it is random observations about life ("Hot girls destroy your life") or him acting like a narrator ("So, we're pretty far into this stupid story now and you're probably saying to yourself, "Hey. I like this girl Rachel. And I'm gonna be pissed off if she dies at the end."). Every now and then, the most ridiculous jokes will pop-up in the story, such as the random one where Greg's dad, obviously a "pothead", goes into a monologue about his experience with half a dozen people lost in the Amazon, adding at the end: "Did you know you could smoke a hornet?" Such a wildly hilarious outburst of clever zaniness is typical for this independent cult 'slice-of-life' film. The only flaw are the last 20 minutes when the movie enters a wrong turn and does some things in a questionable manner: Rachel and Earl warranted more screen time, and it was a pity we didn't find out even more about their personalities. The similar "I Want to Eat Your Pancreas" focused more on the girl in question. They both just suddenly disappear in the end. Greg is depicted in a surprisingly realistic way: he does several mistakes and is clumsy when articulating emotions, just like most teenagers, yet in the end he eventually does the right thing. A small bonus are the wacky short films Greg and Earl made, with a wide range of titles that spoof classics, such as "Pooping Tom", "A Sockwork Orange", "Raging Bullshit" and "Gone with My Wind". Greg's short movie isn't the ultimate tribute to Rachel; this whole movie is.
Grade:+++
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