|
Wilbur Wants to Kill
Himself
review by
Dan Lybarger, 26 March 2004
When a typical film deals with a
dark subject like suicide, you’d expect to hear moody strings
droning over the soundtrack and an atmosphere that exudes lonely
gloom. As Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself starts rolling, we see
a solitary figure stuffing pills down his throat and turning on the
gas of his stove. The strings start to blare more loudly, and the
character’s self-inflicted gloom seems imminent.
A viewer who’s
only watching this scene casually might imagine that we’re in for
yet another dreary flick like The Hours or Sylvia. But
as a would-be rescuer comes rushing into the apartment, cries over
the scene and scampers about looking for a phone, a seemingly
lifeless arm rises and hands him the chordless receiver.
It’s an obvious
sign that the audience is in the hands of that not-so-melancholy
Dane, writer-director Lone Scherfig. Her previous movie, Italian
for Beginners, featured three on-screen deaths in the first
30-40 minutes, but ultimately felt droll and sunny. And even though
that film was shot under the austere demands of the Dogma 95
manifesto (all handheld cameras, no prerecorded soundtrack, etc),
Scherfig ended up with a movie that seemed more sweet and
intelligently uplifting than arty.
This time around
Scherfig has switched to a Scottish setting (although she actually
shot most of it back in her native land) and is working with more
conventional production techniques, but her quirky handling and
low-key humor are still in force.
Her title
character, played by Jamie Sives, is driving everyone else around
him crazy with his quest for do-it-yourself demise. He gets kicked
out to the suicide recovery group sessions because he’s so
obnoxiously unrepentant. When the facilitator Moira (Julie Davis)
asks him what would happen if all humanity killed themselves, he
offhandedly answers, “There’d be no more group.”
He even chews out
his earnestly well-meaning older brother Harbour (Adrian Rawlins),
who rescued him in the opening frames, because he finds his own
continued survival humiliating. Harbour, on the other hand, probably
envies Wilbur’s humiliation because he may have terminal cancer and
a new wife named Alice (Shirley Henderson) and a stepdaughter (Lisa
McKinlay) who stand to lose him almost as quickly as he’s entered
their lives.
In the hands of a
less idiosyncratic filmmaker, this situation would play like a
typically maudlin film that would normally run on Lifetime instead
of in a theater. Scherfig doesn’t always play the setup for laughs (Harbour’s
explanation of Wilbur’s death wish is pretty harrowing), but when
she does, it makes the somewhat contrived premise more agreeable and
even convincing.
The story moves
along predictably, but Scherfig consistently chooses to make
Wilbur's evolution from a selfish whiner into a mensch seem more
gradual and less strident. For example, despite his destructive and
rude disposition, women flock to Wilbur because a strange magnetism
that briefly trumps his thoughtlessness. Somehow no one from these
legions of potential mates, including Moira and Alice,
manages to straighten him out through seduction. It doesn’t hurt
that Sives has the range to make Wilbur’s eventual attitude shift
believable.
The script by Scherfig and fellow Dane
Anders Thomas Jensen has some juicy exchanges, but there are a few
gags that are probably funnier in Copenhagen than they are in
Glasgow (confusing Rudyard Kipling with some sort of pickling
technique just doesn’t translate). The tone shifts downward and
sentimental toward the end, and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
might have benefited from the firmer ensemble approach that Scherfig
adopted in Italian for Beginners. In that film, the eventual
pairing of certain characters didn’t seem forced because each match
had just the right amount of setup. This time around, the subplots
seem a bit underdeveloped, so their resolutions seem abrupt.
Still, Wilbur
Wants to Kill himself demonstrates that Scherfig has a
delightfully warped sensibility that can make stock tales lively and
can also make films that are filled with death but are still weirdly
life affirming. |
