Beyond the Multiplex

"Wristcutters: A Love Story": In the land of suicide, things are a little worse. But at least there's no Starbucks!
Almost a year ago, after "Wristcutters" had played the film-festival circuit and been nominated for a couple of Spirit Awards, one well-placed distribution executive told me that Goran Dukic's debut feature might never get picked up. This was strictly a question of content, and of apparent content at that: Almost everybody who saw the film enjoyed it, but nobody wanted to run interference for a movie that might be seen as treating suicide among young people as comic material.

I'm torn between competing critical impulses here. On one level, I want to leap to the defense of Dukic's wry, lovelorn film, which presents the hereafter reserved for suicides as a gray, trashed and spiritless realm that's just "a little worse" than the world of the living. I feel like I should assure you that "Wristcutters" is life-affirming and morally responsible, that by gosh it's against suicide and doesn't make offing yourself look cool or glamorous. On the other hand, I also think: Screw life-affirming and morally responsible. Dukic is entitled to follow his perverse muse down any dark corridors he wants to, and if we don't believe that all the offensive films glorifying murder have any direct correlation to crime (and I don't), I certainly don't believe that anybody's going to kill themselves because of a low-budget comedy.

In the film's opening scene, a shaggy young fellow named Zia (Patrick Fugit) gets out of bed, cleans up his semi-demolished, post-collegiate room and then slits his wrists in the bathroom. We have no idea why, at least at first. Dukic doesn't show us the act, but he briefly shows us the aftermath, which is plenty unglamorous. Zia awakens from that spreading pool of blood to find himself essentially transported right into -- well, into the urban America of the 1980s, or to put it another way, into precisely the world that produced "Repo Man" and "Stranger Than Paradise."

Zia's postmortem life begins in a nameless city (clearly the less attractive districts of Los Angeles) that's been meticulously drained of color and vitality. Everybody is perfectly aware how they got there and what the deal is: Some people have nasty holes in their heads or disquieting pools of purple and green under their skin. (Zia of course has impressive scars on his wrists.) There are no brightly lit chain stores; it's a dream America of broken windows and hand-lettered signs. The economy of Suicideland clearly sucks, in a way that will seem strikingly familiar to Americans of the right vintage. Everyone seems distracted and bored (gas stations are constantly losing their nozzles when people drive off without removing them from their cars). No one ever smiles; it seems to be physically impossible. The night sky has no stars.

Zia argues about cottage cheese and bathroom habits with his gruff Austrian roommate. He has a job making unappetizing pies for the Pizzeria Kamikaze (get it?) and spends his leisure hours with a cheerfully sleazy, mutton-chopped Russian musician named Eugene (Shea Whigham), whose entire family has been reunited on this side of the veil. Convinced that Desiree (Leslie Bibb), the girlfriend who spurned him in life, is now somewhere in this grim country, Zia convinces Eugene to hit the road in search of her. So off they go in Eugene's rattletrap, which can't be driven after dark (the headlights) and tends to suck sunglasses, maps and cassette tapes to unknown destinations (the black hole).

So far this sounds a lot like my life at age 23 or so, and maybe like yours too. Fundamentally "Wriscutters" isn't about suicide at all; it's about how life, when you're young and aimless, can sometimes feel like a living death, a condition a "little worse" than the real world. What makes the film work despite its almost slavish devotion to its deadpan, Jarmuschian roots is its finely crafted contrasts -- between Fugit's restrained performance and Whigham's goofball pseudo-Russian, for example -- and its whimsical attention to detail. After Zia destroys a gas-station pump in the aforementioned manner, the big bruiser who owns the place comes steaming out to the car. But not to kick Zia's ass. Instead, he makes Zia fill out a faded, photocopied form that asks, among other things, what he was thinking about when he drove away with the nozzle in his tank. Such statements are important to the bureaucracy of the dead, I guess.

Zia's still too stuck on the maybe-dead Desiree to pay much attention to diffident and difficult Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), a raven-haired tomboy who insists she needs to find the "people in charge" and convince them that she never intended to kill herself at all. But we notice her, all right. Dukic tries to cram too much plot into the last third of the film, as Zia, Eugene and Mikal end up in a mysterious desert encampment presided over by Tom Waits and then stumble upon an even-weirder apocalyptic cult whose self-styled messiah seems to have taken on Desiree as his personal assistant.

"Wristcutters" is simultaneously dark and sweet, always a difficult combination to pull off. It views its characters with both archness and affection, and even as it lovingly recalls films of another era it insists that the painful awkwardness of youth is perennial. It's a mannered movie whose vision is stark and whose emotions feel completely authentic, and for me at least that's irresistible. When two lovers in the film finally spend a tender night together, curled up on the beach (it's implied, although not definitively stated, that sex is not possible), they wake up at dawn to discover they've been sleeping on an expanse of used condoms and syringes. In the land of suicide you take love however you find it.

"Wristcutters: A Love Story" opens Oct. 19 in New York and Oct. 26 in Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

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