Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) is on the far side of the spectrum from snark and irony, but maybe it could use a little more of it. It's about searching for innocence -- but that can be read, by some, as lusting for regression. The worst example of this tendency occurs when the little boy gives the butch art dealer a peck on the cheek on a park bench; the kid is a like a little roving fairy that cures middle-aged malaise just by virtue of his prelapsarian youthfulness. And the art dealer is your typical cold, repressive, self-serious type -- despite the fact that she utters the best line in the movie, a full-on parody of art-world obtuseness, "If it weren't for AIDS there'd be no email!" It's out-of-nowhere lines like that that keep the movie afloat. Miranda July, as an actress, has the odd misfortune of looking too much like what she is, and she emotes insecure, sugarplum sorrow with alarming ease and frequency. Like her love interest and his older son, her eyeballs are big enough to make Bambi's look like marbles; the shoe salesman has a distractingly creepy, volatile look -- like a medieval hick (he was in "Winter's Bone") -- and yet he's got an odd twitch about the nose, like a bunny rabbit or Sam on "Bewitched." The love affair between these two, on which the movie is unevenly balanced, seems sudden and without foundation. Yet, at times, July pushes you away and then somehow wins you over: She trails the salesman as he leaves work, and wears her self-consciousness on her sleeve. You think he's going to bop her. But they tug a metaphor like taffy, and you think, This chick's got game. (At least with creeps.)In an odd contrast with the recklessly emotive adults, the two biracial boys, and a young girl that the older boy gets acquainted with, seem almost like Children of the Damned. But the infamous "poop back-and-forth" bit is very funny (despite culminating, oh-so-cleverly, in that smooch -- which, upon reflection, is a pretty damning culmination: She can only be sexually honest with a small child tout court -- isn't it odd how much baggage comes with this quirk?), and there's something like Lynch Lite in the blowjob scene. Their weird affair with the shoe seller's coworker is, I suppose, an antithesis of the general message; he likes to think dirty thoughts about the wanna-be sluts (still really virgins, of course) but can't consummate them. But, really, I could do without those lewd messages he posts on his window: You'd think the Neighborhood Watch would have him under citizen's arrest. But Peter's relationship with the little girl -- even the 15-year-old has more innocent times to reflect on -- functions well as a parodic metaphor for the adults' questing for innocence. There are a lot of too-heavy touches of lighthearted sadness, and one wonders how well this will all age -- particularly the too-cool-for-school soundtrack, which sounds like a record needle skipping or indie marching orders -- but July's wide eyes apply to her directorial vision, too, and that informs the unreconstructed innocence of her comic gaze. It's a refined wisp of a movie with a few very memorable moments.
