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United Kingdom, United States, France · 2012
1h 43m
Director Michel Gondry
Starring Michael Brodie, Laidychen Carrasco, Raymond Delgado
Genre Drama
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The We and the I is the heartfelt, comical, coming-of-age story of the final bus ride home for a group of young high school students and graduates. The film focuses not on a single character, or even characters, but instead tells interlocking and incomplete stories of the fleeting thrill of being young and growing up.
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The New York Times by A.O. Scott
To call this thrillingly original, deeply felt movie a coming-of-age story would be to insult it with cliché. It’s much more the story, or rather a series of interlocking, incomplete stories, about what it feels like to be a certain age and to feel caught, as the title suggests, between the desire to be yourself and the longing to fit in.
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 Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
Michel Gondry takes an idiosyncratic, funny, unexpectedly poignant snapshot of American youth in The We and the I. Rambling and unpolished, the film has a scrappy charm that springs organically from the characters and their stories rather than being artificially coaxed.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Most of the performances are as unpolished as they are heartfelt, which is both endearing and distracting.
Gondry's argument – that pack mentality crushes individual expression – follows a similarly predictable route, but there's enough of his signature playfulness (especially in the use of mobile-phone footage to present flashbacks) to keep the journey entertaining.
Muddled, muffled and mixing empty comedy with empty dramatics, The We and the I is an abject failure.
Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo
A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.
Fake documentaries annoy me — why not put in the effort and deliver the real thing? — and this one is not only aimless and stiff, it also rings false.
Village Voice by Michelle Orange
At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments
The A.V. Club by Tasha Robinson
The problem with The We And The I: Gondry is focused more on moments than on the film as a whole.
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