Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007)
The glib title is, mercifully, the hardest lump to swallow in Wristcutters: A Love Story, a picture that doesn’t so much evade the Sundance Toys-R-Us “independent” film ingredients (willfully eclectic cast, audience pandering coming of age road movie scenario) as slightly transcend them. These characters aren’t showy about their unhappiness: they drink cheap beer, shoot pool, and work grungy jobs, with little hope of ever turning another corner. They could kill themselves of course, and one would be tempted to consider these indulgent still kinda youths a suicide risk, except they already thought of that. The characters of Wristcutters have all successfully “offed” themselves, and the punishment turns out to be yet another level of thankless not quite middle class hell, an afterlife that, in the words of the star, Zia (Patrick Fugit) is “just slightly shittier than everything before.”
The writer-director, Goran Dukic, apparently understanding that novelty concept afterlife movies don’t normally work (usually a stream of increasingly tiring heavenly puns capped with a self-righteous happy ending), and that coming of age youthster pictures are even more hazardous, finds a careful balance between low comedy and a despair that’s really a gentle befuddlement. We never remotely believe that Zia is detached enough to have actually offed himself, the act feels entirely too heavy for the story that follows, but the picture’s sidestepping of that never really becomes an issue. The film has an early Jim Jarmusch/ Jonathan Demme vibe: affection for its characters, as well as a poignant understanding of its own slightness. We root for Wristcutters.
Or more accurately we root for the three characters the film has to put to the road: Zia, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) and Eugene (Shea Wigham). Zia is looking to find an ex, Mikal is convinced she wound up in the New Jersey karma turnpike wasteland by mistake, and Eugene is trying to get laid. This is the first Fugit picture I’ve seen since Almost Famous, and he proves here, unlike Kate Hudson, that he may not be a one notable performance deal. Fugit has the uncalculated emotional deflation and ironic sex appeal of a young Bud Cort. Like Cort, Fugit glamorizes and satirizes movie character misery in equal measure; you buy his unoriginal problems without feeling stupid in the morning.
Sossamon, winning in the better than it’s thought to be A Knights Tale, has the flakey-hot intelligence of Winona Ryder in the 1980s; an ability, like Fugit, to renew canned clichés and emotions. You want these two to get together (if you thought Fugit was going to get with the ex, you don’t care enough about movies to read my site) because they sell the melting of one another’s mutual self-containment with a minimum of effort; there’s no grand scene or contrivance to shove their affection down our throats, its just, simply, beautifully, there.
Wigham and Tom Waits ensure that Wristcutters meets its weird quotient, but they work. Wigham takes a potentially problem part, “the foreigner”, and scores a few strange comic bulls-eyes, his attempted seduction of Sossamon so shameless and disgusting that you can’t help but root for him. It’s also a shame that Waits doesn’t find more film work that interests him, because he’s a truly original presence in movies: a hipster poet badass with the primal rasp of a great movie monster (his delirious Renfield is a highlight of Coppola’s also underrated Dracula), though Waits might disrupt the consistency of Wristcutters’ vision: its hard to believe that any world with him as a guardian angel can be all that bad.
It’s also testament to the picture’s charm that I not only accepted the ending, but encouraged it: a normally irritating reversal of woes that, for once, ends on the correct beat, resisting the urge to cheapen the emotion with a few more scenes of tidying up. We don’t know what happens to Zia exactly, but a beautiful woman is smiling at him, and, for the moment, that is more than enough.
★★★
April 16th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Such a great review I won’t even bother attempting to compare it to mine. I never thought of comparing Bud Cort to Fugit but you’re dead on. And I felt the same about the ending, too. It’s pretty predictable (as I do love your blog, natch) but like you said, it’s also hoped for. Just curious as to why you gave it 3 stars instead of 4 as you seem to have relatively little bad to say about it.
April 16th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Appreciate the kind words Justin. I try to be selective with my four stars and save those for the heavy duty pictures (I went through a stage last fall where I was handing them out like toy buzzers) that really hit you in the face or that I absolutely love. Wristcutters doesn’t, for me, fall into either of those categories, though it was a happy surprise and I’m glad to have caught it. Here’s hoping those leads expand and find something they can fly in.