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WRISTCUTTERS:
A LOVE STORY
(Review)
Wristcutters: A Love Story opens with Zia (Almost Famous’ Patrick Fugit) cleaning up his room, before he proceeds to slit his wrists. But even as he lies bleeding to death, he sees a stray, sad little dust bunny which has managed to escape his attention, off in the corner…
Based on Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, Wristcutters is a black comedy that posits an afterlife for suicides which is pretty much identical to this world, except it’s worse; with a population made up entirely of people who’ve offed themselves, you can imagine it isn’t an awfully cheery place.
So Zia finds himself working at Kamikaze Pizza, and generally missing his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb), till he meets Russian would-be rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham, who appears in the upcoming horror films, Town Creek and Splinter), and subsequently discovers what happened to Desiree after his death, knowledge that propels him to go on a road trip to try and find the one thing he believes will make his current situation bearable.
Written and directed by Goran Dukic, Wristcutters takes this bizarre and intriguing premise and sadly, doesn’t do too much with it.
Yes, there are some amusing bits in here, and the final ten minutes or so are suffused with a melancholy that almost manages to move, but the vast majority of the film doesn’t live up to its premise. The narrative just doesn’t, excuse me, come alive; it fails to properly engage the viewer in Zia’s quest. Which is tragic, since the film’s concept really does have a lot of potential.
A large part of why Wristcutters didn’t work for me is the way Dukic fails to take full advantage of the road movie genre to create an involving narrative. A road movie, by its very nature, has a story that constantly moves forward, that gets characters from point A to point Zed, ultimately changed by the journey, transformed by velocity and geography.
The trouble with Wristcutters is that the journey doesn’t feel very transformative.
Once Zia leaves the city, the only time the film kicks into a passably interesting gear again is when Zia and company encounter Kneller (Tom Waits). The introduction of hitchhiker Mikal (Catacombs’ Shannyn Sossamon) doesn’t really do too much for the proceedings, even after we discover her motivation for traveling: she claims she’s here because of a mistake, and she’s looking for the people in charge to set things to right.
The major culprit I feel, is Dukic’s script, which doesn’t seem to afford moments and opportunities for the narrative to properly display who these characters are, and what they feel for each other.
For some reason which I can’t really pin down (beyond the fact that it’s also essentially a road movie), this reminded me of Liev Schreiber’s film adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated, except Schreiber’s effort exquisitely captured the right tone of epiphany and melancholy that I felt Wristcutters needed in order for it to work.
In the end, Wristcutters isn’t a terrible film, and it’s certainly more original than the average movie out there, whether indie or Hollywood. But because the central idea was so tantalizing, I just felt that there should have been something more substantial there than what I ultimately witnessed.
Parting shot: A review of Catacombs can be found in the Archive.
(Wristcutters: A Love Story OS courtesy of impawards.com.)
A LOVE STORY
(Review)
Wristcutters: A Love Story opens with Zia (Almost Famous’ Patrick Fugit) cleaning up his room, before he proceeds to slit his wrists. But even as he lies bleeding to death, he sees a stray, sad little dust bunny which has managed to escape his attention, off in the corner…
Based on Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, Wristcutters is a black comedy that posits an afterlife for suicides which is pretty much identical to this world, except it’s worse; with a population made up entirely of people who’ve offed themselves, you can imagine it isn’t an awfully cheery place.
So Zia finds himself working at Kamikaze Pizza, and generally missing his girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb), till he meets Russian would-be rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham, who appears in the upcoming horror films, Town Creek and Splinter), and subsequently discovers what happened to Desiree after his death, knowledge that propels him to go on a road trip to try and find the one thing he believes will make his current situation bearable.
Written and directed by Goran Dukic, Wristcutters takes this bizarre and intriguing premise and sadly, doesn’t do too much with it.
Yes, there are some amusing bits in here, and the final ten minutes or so are suffused with a melancholy that almost manages to move, but the vast majority of the film doesn’t live up to its premise. The narrative just doesn’t, excuse me, come alive; it fails to properly engage the viewer in Zia’s quest. Which is tragic, since the film’s concept really does have a lot of potential.
A large part of why Wristcutters didn’t work for me is the way Dukic fails to take full advantage of the road movie genre to create an involving narrative. A road movie, by its very nature, has a story that constantly moves forward, that gets characters from point A to point Zed, ultimately changed by the journey, transformed by velocity and geography.
The trouble with Wristcutters is that the journey doesn’t feel very transformative.
Once Zia leaves the city, the only time the film kicks into a passably interesting gear again is when Zia and company encounter Kneller (Tom Waits). The introduction of hitchhiker Mikal (Catacombs’ Shannyn Sossamon) doesn’t really do too much for the proceedings, even after we discover her motivation for traveling: she claims she’s here because of a mistake, and she’s looking for the people in charge to set things to right.
The major culprit I feel, is Dukic’s script, which doesn’t seem to afford moments and opportunities for the narrative to properly display who these characters are, and what they feel for each other.
For some reason which I can’t really pin down (beyond the fact that it’s also essentially a road movie), this reminded me of Liev Schreiber’s film adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated, except Schreiber’s effort exquisitely captured the right tone of epiphany and melancholy that I felt Wristcutters needed in order for it to work.
In the end, Wristcutters isn’t a terrible film, and it’s certainly more original than the average movie out there, whether indie or Hollywood. But because the central idea was so tantalizing, I just felt that there should have been something more substantial there than what I ultimately witnessed.
Parting shot: A review of Catacombs can be found in the Archive.
(Wristcutters: A Love Story OS courtesy of impawards.com.)
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