Me Without You

Anyone wondering how long we’d all have to wait before Michelle Williams treated us to an unclothed glimpse at her generous assets can finally stop wondering — Michelle at long last shows us the goods in Me Without You (as you can see for yourself in the picture gallery here), which comes out July 5.

THE PREMISE

There are two types of little girls: pretty ones and clever ones. The pretty ones are as vapid and destructive as they are fun; the clever ones are as mousy and plain as they are soulful.

Clever but plain Holly makes a childhood pact with pretty but vapid Marina to be friends forever, and so rigid is this pretty-clever caste system that even as Holly blossoms into womanhood (when Michelle Williams takes over the role) and arguably looks a lot more attractive than Marina (Anna Friel), Marina manages to keep Holly the mousy, plain follower she was as a child — manages to keep them both children, in effect — through constant criticism and by squashing every competing affection Holly might harbor for anyone other than Marina. But after three decades of spiteful co-dependence, Holly starts to wonder if she wouldn’t be better off without her longtime twin...

THE PERKS

There’s some wholly gratutitous toplessness from both Anna and Michelle here and there throughout the film: Both of them appear topless while sharing a tub and a cigarette and listening to Anna’s parents fight. Michelle’s breasts make one further cameo as she groggily pulls her shirt on after a night with “Nat”, although they also make a half appearance in a dream sequence in which she lies naked but strategically covered in plastic vines. (This is as close as the film gets to anything that might be called “erotic”.) Anna’s chest gets a bit more air time, but all of the nudity — both Anna’s and Michelle’s — is pretty incidental and best appreciated in still photos.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The film is very well acted by all involved, most notably Michelle Williams, who, though her accent slips now and then, holds her own as the star of the film. The film itself, though, left me wondering if it was really worth the hour and a half drive it took to see it. (It’s not exactly in wide release.) My problem with it is twofold:

Phantom Esoterica. The music scene was so prominent in the film (the soundtrack, the frequent clubbing, the product-placement-like insertion of posters for this or that band) and so specific (Clash-era punk, then post-punk New Wave) that I got the sense that there was supposed to be something about this period in British history that was especially relevant to the story, or even that the story was a metaphor for something going on in the history. That it takes place in Britain, too, seemed important — important enough that its American star conspicuously had to learn a British accent. (Otherwise they could just as easily have hired an Englishwoman to do the job, or set the story in the U.S. ... or Brazil, for that matter.)
In other words, Me Without You seemed like it was the very specific, personal story of two specific girls (or a personal, even esoteric study of a very specific period of history — either way, I feel a little out of the loop), when in fact, according to the press release, director/writer Sandra Goldbacher wanted the story to be universal and timeless — which certainly would have been the better, more accessible way to go.
The Suspense. That Holly needs to leave Marina seems evident to the audience from the get-go, so the whole film basically becomes a matter of waiting for Holly to make that connection on her own. Which wouldn’t be so bad, I suppose, if there were some compelling reason why she shouldn’t leave Marina, some consequence beyond merely hurting Marina’s feelings. You know, some drama.

Once or twice during the film Holly and Marina were compared to Siamese twins — an interesting angle that the film might have explored more. After all, Chang and Eng (the famous twins from whom we get the name “Siamese twins”) came to a tragic end when they parted ways: when one brother died, the other couldn’t bear it and died shortly after. Making the analogy between the two pairs more explicit and protracted might have helped to unstick the story from Britain and the punk era on the one hand and help create a sense that something horrible would happen if Holly should ever leave Marina.

I don’t know. A screenwriter I ain’t — but as the audience I have to say that the film, while not properly “bad”, was not properly “good”, either. It was, of course, fun just to see Michelle on the big screen again, but in the end this film’s primary legacy will be to provide a few more vidcaps to Michelle’s slowly growing collection nudie pictures on the internet from movies that nobody saw.