Beguiling Wristcutters a Surreal Romance
After his romance goes south, young adult Zia (Patrick Fugit) decides to clean up his pigsty of an apartment and then slit his wrists in the middle of his freshly scrubbed bathroom. What he doesn’t realize is that by killing himself he’d end up in blandly colorless form of afterlife working in a rundown pizza shop and living with an anal retentive foreigner with a thing for cottage cheese. “It’s just like before,” the suicide victim says in blandly ironic voiceover, “only it’s just a little bit worse.”
Shannyn Sossamon and Patrick Fugit in Autonomous Films' Wristcutters: A Love Story
When he discovers his former girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb) is now stuck in this banal purgatory for taking her own life, too, Zia decides to grab his only friend Eugene (Shea Whigham) and hit the road to find her. Along the way they pick up a red-shirted hitchhiker named Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) insisting she shouldn’t be there and desperately searching for the people in charge so she can be sent back to life. Soon these three walking dead discover their world might not be as bleak as they once thought, and no matter how depressing this afterlife gets there are still small miracles waiting to be found which might actually make things – if not better – at least a bit more alive.
I can’t figure out why it has taken so long for writer and director Goran Dukic’s 2006 feature Wristcutters: A Love Story (based Etgar Keret’s short story Kneller's Happy Campers) to take so long to finally get to theaters or why it generated so much early controversy. Despite its slightly surreal and bleak premise, the film is pretty original and definitely perversely amusing. Even better, it’s actually surprisingly sweet, the slightly atypical love story at its core warm-heartedly endearing by the time all is finally said and done.
Don’t get me wrong. Even though this picture won Dukic a 2006 Golden Space Needle award for Best Director at that year’s Seattle International Film Festival (as well as an Independent Spirit nomination for Best First Film), a lot of this is still pretty rough. It took a good half hour or so for the filmmaker to finally drawn me into his world, a lot of the early scenes feeling more like a curiously austere film school project then a fully fleshed out concept for an independent feature.
Still, while the road can be pretty bumpy the ride the director presents is certainly unlike anything else I’ve had the chance to see this year. There are some pretty bizarrely engaging ideas floating throughout this things, while certain scenes and images are so poetically transfixing I can’t wait to get the DVD so I can watch a couple of them again. Besides, any movie that features Tom Waits as a laidback desert guru who looks like he just walked off the beach can’t be all bad, while a string of other curiously cast supporting players (including Will Arnett, Jake Busey and John Hawkes) constantly keep things interesting.
But it is the primary threesome of Fugit, Sossamon and Whigham who ultimately make all this magical deadpan realism come off as well as it does. All of them have some beautiful moments, the first two in particular lighting up the screen a time or two in ways I just didn’t see coming. For Sossamon I call that a surprise, for while I didn’t really mind the actress in A Knight’s Tale I can’t exactly say I’ve ever thought she was the most talented performer in the world. And yet she’s just great here, and whether throwing a match into a starless sky like a lonely firefly of hope or smiling at a bedside partner for what feels like the very first time watching her and Fugit together came dangerously close to breaking my heart.
So don’t let the subject matter or the curiously off-putting (yet peculiarly engaging) title fool you, this is a movie I think people should do their best to search out and see. It might not be perfect and it may take a little while to get going but Wristcutters: A Love Story is as romantic as it is beguiling, and in a year of too many sequels, remakes and more-of-the-same this film is a quiet beacon of originality impossible to resist.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
