Me Him Her

Studio: FilmBuff
Directed by Max Landis

Mar 10, 2016 By Kyle Turner Web Exclusive

The opening sounds of Fun. are like artillery fire: once you hear it, it’s too late. Me Him Her is 90 minutes long, and every one of which is interminable. “What about me is gay?” says Brendan (Luke Bracey), donning a pink shirt and femme vocal affectations, gesticulating just enough to make the point, Oh, this character is obviously gay. Like, how dare we not automatically make this assumption? He says this as he comes out to his best friend Cory (Dustin Milligan), who is not surprised. Less an act of progressive thought and more a bit of self-indulgence and a kind of hipster gay panic in its own way, the opening conversation foretells but a miserable viewing experience.

Max Landis’s Me Him Her is barely filmed with competence, its rack focuses and shot constructions barely film school passable. It is sloppy. Rather than an intentional disorientation, the sex scene is just so poorly shot that one can’t discern anything: bodies, gestures, space.

It depicts gay LA as a haunted house of sorts, employing horror film tropes that, with a skillful person behind the camera, could be effective. (Edge of Seventeen hints at the anxiety of the closet and act of exploring one’s sexual identity.) But Me Him Her is written and directed by a straight guy – nay, a straight bro. To just call Landis straight would be a disservice to the straight identifying directors that have made incredibly impressive queer films, from Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The problem with Landis’s perspective is that it’s so myopic, built on a very caricaturish idea of queer identity that’s dominated not the authentic facsimile of gay male culture, but on the facsimile of that facsimile.

Sure, there’s evidence that there may be systematic homophobia within Hollywood, yet the inelegance of Landis’s script doesn’t give his Brandan any nuance or complexity, nor does it understand the contemporary cultural atmosphere regarding gay identity in the media. Where Me Him Her hints at the way gay identity is made a commodity (Brendan, an actor, comes out to his publicists), it drops the ball when it does not actually understand this concept beyond buzzwords. For Brendan to monologue about being sacred means little when it’s so contrived and lacks the articulation of authentic anxiety. It’s a cop out.

And even if Cory’s views aren’t explicitly endorsed in the film, nor are they particularly condemned. It’s not merely a matter of a film with bad politics, but a film whose corrosive ideology leaves it with literally nothing else in terms of merit.

This is billed as Landis’s directorial debut: he, the son of director John Landis, has written Chronicle, American Ultra, and Victor Frankenstein, has revealed nothing if not his ineptitude at film form, never mind character construction, or even adequate sensitivity and complexity. It’s the film equivalent of a drunk frat bro’s vomit after he says, “I love the gays!” It is absolutely more concerned with its straight character’s narrative of trying to sleep (again) with a lesbian, and cares not about its gay lead’s identity. It’s like a moronic Chasing Amy. Almost curiously, what Me Him Her – with its off the wall dimwit performances, its shallow script, and its incompetent form – ultimately reveals is that the most vocally “progressive” people are probably clueless dirt bags.

Author rating: 1/10

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