[yasr_overall_rating]
A down and out actress secretly sells a reality show about her friend, a delusional eccentric, a once famous creator of reality shows, who now believe that his entire life is being filmed by hidden cameras and that he is the star of his very own reality show.
The trouble with trying to satirize reality television is that its shamelessness makes it immune to ridicule; you can hold a mirror up to it, but it doesn’t care how bad it looks, just that it gets looked at. “Me” has no trouble convincing us that its characters, and the world of reality television, are fundamentally awful, but isn’t so good at making its takedown particularly entertaining. The film starts with a meeting of two old friends, Levy and Susan (Levy is Jefrey Levy, who directed the film, and Susan is Susan Traylor, who produced the film – the two are credited as co-writers of the script); Levy, a disgraced television producer, operates under the delusion that he’s been filming a reality show from his home about his relationship with plants, and he’s invited Susan to help produce and write the show, to counter his fears that the “show” is becoming stale. Susan, good friend that she is, decides that Levy’s dementia would be great fodder for a real reality show, and sets about producing a series about her crazy friend, and the series he thinks he’s already in. I really wish I could tell you it’s not as convoluted as it sounds.
There’s a plot, but just barely – actors are cast as “employees” of Levy, and a love interest is hired. To work around Levy’s obstreperousness and mental instability, a replacement Levy is also cast, and we flirt with the idea that we’re making a reality show about someone and not actually having them in it (the film never fully commits to the idea of having a fake Levy, and it seems like they decide to use the real Levy early on, but it’s barely acknowledged). The biggest problem with Levy’s character is that there’s no consistency to his condition. He can be arrogant, he can be oversensitive, he can be intrusive, or aggressively reclusive, but usually he’s just doing whatever it takes to be as inconvenient and off-putting as possible. He comes across as less like a man in psychic distress, and more like an improv performer who’s gone rogue. I don’t think they have a pill for that. Susan is quickly revealed to be as, or possibly more, unhinged than Levy. Her part consists of maneuvering wildly to keep her show afloat, and displaying a raging narcissism that never gets punished, or addressed.
The show becomes a hit, with Susan performing Herculean fits of dishonesty and coercion to keep everything together. There are arguments, there’s a party, Molly Ringwald plays an aspiring actress who apparently wows the network executives (spoiler: this goes nowhere, and gets abandoned pretty quickly, which is a story problem that happens so often you sort of get used to it). Eventually there’s a scheme by the show’s love interest (and eventual real love interest) to murder Levy and inherit his fortune. It’s exposed pretty quickly, but only foiled at the last possible second, in order to milk the attempted homicide’s ratings potential. By the way, “Me” is ostensibly a comedy, but the less said about its jokes, the better.
“Me” is easily at its best when we see the fruits of everyone’s labor. There are sequences that show “Me” (the show-within-a-movie) as it’s broadcast to the world, with its superfluous camera tricks, over-reliance on cliffhangers, and ever-present scroll feeds that promote the show’s social media content. It has a nauseating effect, but it’s an apt lampooning of a reality show, with the reality skewed just enough to make the point clear, without veering into obviousness. For all its faults, “Me” (the movie) is very familiar with what it’s decrying.
Several references are made to the 1976 film “Network,” down to conspiracies to kill the show’s star; Levy actually asks Susan to be his personal Faye Dunaway, a reference to Dunaway’s portrayal of ruthless producer Diana Christensen. It’s the comparisons to “Network” that help highlight what’s really sabotaging “Me.” Where “Network” succeeded was in contrasting the rise of sensational, hollow media with the crumbling gravitas of William Holden’s aging, increasingly out-of-touch producer; the fungal creep of craven and aggressively amoral content is destroying any legitimacy the news – and by extension, television – might have carried, and we can appreciate that loss. “Me” operates void of any redeeming characters or values, and isn’t funny or well-told enough to hide these absences. It succeeds at depicting the world of reality television as a wasteland of desperation and narcissism, but doesn’t have a case for why we should endure a feature-length trek through such a toxic environment.
