Critics reviews

At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth's forever moments, those heavy gaps between school and home, senior year and summer, the person you are and the person you hope to be—when the future is a distant void and all the best and worst parts of life span the length of a city bus.

There's the constant sense that Gondry views these kids the same way he thinks of his props: just movable figures to be idiosyncratically manipulated. By the end of the ride, the movie's messy humanity has officially calcified into After-School Special clichés; given the choice between handcrafted whimsy and heavy-handedness, we'll take the former, thanks.

The kids start out ensconced in specific groups based on race, culture, and personal taste, defining themselves as class clowns or tough guys or sensitive artists, but the ones who stick around longest get impelled toward singular identities as the bus empties out, the carapace of their assumed personas giving way to moments of real emotional vulnerability.

The fluidity and immediacy of Gondry's eye (and camera), and the film's identification with a city's youthful life force are infectious. Embedded in his subject matter, the director, in essence, has gone native.

Sadly, Gondry, in the name of democracy, or liberalism, or perhaps his own sociological predilections, ceded entirely too much thematic control to these blinkered, immature kids, so the result, finally, is a film that celebrates bullying, aggression, misogyny, and general teenage assholery... As a final product, The We and the I is a depressing look at mean, unpleasant kids who, due to their underprivileged status, have been "given voice." They didn't do much with it.

If the production mimics some of the handheld self-absorption of mumblecore, it is also a rejoinder (and in the context of TIFF, the anti-Frances Ha) to movies about "white people problems." And all the more welcome.

At feature length, it feels inordinately unfocused, and a last-minute swerve into earnest speechifying doesn't help. Still, I'd rather see Gondry experiment with small-scale movies like this than squander his creativity on Hollywood superhero spoofs.