It’s a Hard-Knock Afterlife
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It’s a little too perfect that a movie envisioning the afterlife for suicide victims should come out of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. “Wristcutters: A Love Story,” adapted by the director Goran Dukic from an Israeli novella, sends a black-comedy premise on a purgatorial voyage into the realm of parceled-out quirk and cutesy deadpan romance. Round about the moment a character falls for a mute throat-singer in a goofy furry hat, you realize the movie has tilted irredeemably away from its early, thorny promise.
One day, after cleaning up his apartment, Zia (Patrick Fugit) kills himself, unable to get over his ex-girlfriend. But the next world, for those who committ suicide at least, turns out to be just a shabbier, washed-out, bargain-basement version of the one he left. Zia wage-slaves at a pizza joint with a silly name (Kamikaze Pizza) and bunks with a fussy Austrian roommate. Wondering what to do with his (after)life, and still carrying a torch for his ex, Desiree (Leslie Bibb), he hangs out at a bar with mutton-chopped ex-rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham), who lives with his Croatian family, all of whom “offed” themselves. On the jukebox: Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Just when you’re deciding whether the flashbacks to bit characters’ moments of death are funny enough to escape tastelessness, “Wristcutters” shifts into gear as a slacky find-the-girl road movie. Zia and Eugene set out in search of Desiree, leaving behind their warehouse neighborhood for the pale desert beyond, which looks as if someone had screwed in a fluorescent bulb where the sun should be. Everything, in the film’s best conceit, is halfhearted and mediocre: A highway cop wears a slovenly regular shirt with a pinned badge drooping, a roadside diner looks like a squat.
Zia and Eugene pick up a forthright, darkly pretty hitchhiker named Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), and the ineffectual foot-shuffling between past love and present crush begins. Mikal’s own quest is to petition “the people in charge” about the injustice of her being in this world, which gives the story another little mystery to solve along the way. They all end up roosting at a kind of spiritual halfway-home campground, benignly tended by Tom Waits as Kneller. There, visitors experience precious miracles and epiphanies that uncannily notch off moments of character development. Kneller’s rumpled, weird-granddad presence makes one suspect that “Wristcutters” might have been better as a Tom Waits song named after a backstreet in New Orleans. But Waits fans shouldn’t get too excited: Besides the dippy score by Bobby Johnston, the only music, ostensibly Eugene’s, is by gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello. Another stop on the journey remains, starring Will Arnett as a deflated messiah in a disco fort (like Mr. Waits, not quite incentive enough for ironically attending the movie) and Ms. Bibb as the utterly uncompelling Desiree. Since the film introduces and explains every bend in the road (unlike the intriguing tonal ambiguity of its setup), “Wristcutters” feels like one of those movies that will be playing whenever you turn on the Sundance Channel in a year, where you’ll instantly recognize at what plot point you’ve tuned in but can’t remember watching it through.
Mr. Fugit is probably still best known (ironically) for “Almost Famous,” and as the pasty-faced piner he’s effectively ineffectual here. More fun is Mr. Whigham’s brusque Eugene, who succeeds when he underplays his sight-gag of a character. Probably the strongest character is the concertedly lackadaisical, weary-looking locations and sets, especially as they appear in the film’s drained palette.
Too pat ultimately to earn its mordant title, “Wristcutters,” for all the strangeness of its no-account netherworld, feels like a depressingly ordinary, familiar ride. Even the story’s implicit charting of new depths in shy-guy self-pity, not entirely parodic, fails to rile. For the great beyond, this eminently postmillennial indie, a 2006 Sundance selection, will not be annexing the cult-film shelf space of 1980s favorites “Heathers” or even “Beetlejuice.”