Writer-director Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story (from a novella by Etgar Keret) has a premise that’s as intriguing as it is potentially offensive (or potentially precious). Opening with the suicide of its main character Zia, Wristcutters mainly takes place in a netherworld populated by Zia and his fellow suicides. The twist here? This version of the afterlife is a lot like the life that the dead were all-too-eager to leave, only drearier. Here everyone’s faces are gray and drawn. Smiling is impossible. The landscape is a barren desert dotted by abandoned furniture and cars; prohibitive signs mark everything; and sunglasses, once dropped under a car seat, are literally lost in an abyss forever. Zia spends his afterlife working a dispiriting job at a pizza place and continuing to devote much of his time to being depressed, staring at his ceiling while a record revolves on his turntable.
Yet Wristcutters makes this setting, and the characters that inhabit it, genuinely funny, particularly in the early going. Patrick Fugit plays Zia, and the young actor displays the same knack for understated, organic humor that he did in his break-out role in Almost Famous and – perhaps to a greater extent – in his turn in the comedy Saved!. It helps that he’s joined by an amusing Shea Whigham as Eugene, a Russian immigrant who killed himself onstage at one of his rock band’s gigs. (He tells Zia that Iggy Pop almost showed up for said gig.) Eugene is apparently named for Gogol Bordello singer Eugene Hutz, whose band contributes a number of infectious songs to the soundtrack, giving the entire enterprise a nice lift. (It may be inevitable that Joy Division’s “Love will Tear Us Apart” also surfaces, on the jukebox at a bar in Zia’s purgatory.) Joining Eugene and Zia is Shannon Sossamon as Mikal, an upbeat young woman who insists that she has arrived in their world by some mistake. She’s a wonderful character, particularly when she scrawls “Unless you want to!” over a “No Smoking” sign or convinces Zia to spray paint of bouqet of dead flowers.
Sossamon and Fugit make a charming pair, and the time they spend as part of a trio rounded out by Whigham is great fun, albeit with a pronounced undercurrent of melancholy. Pity that the fun withers a bit as the plot thickens (Tom Waits arrives as a mystery man who runs a camp where inhabitants perform tiny, effortless miracles; Will Arnett surfaces as a false Messiah.), and the film bogs down before it comes to its moving (if not surprising) conclusion. Nevertheless, Wristcutters is an uncommon and endearing love story, and Dukic is worth keeping an eye on.
by Victoria Large | Source: Lion’s Gate DVD
24 Oct 2008 8:33 AM | Submit Comment
