I really wanted to love Wristcutters. It’s populated with actors I adore, and the idea seemed charming. If they could make it work, it would be so beautiful. It is beautiful, and the actors really are that cool. But I had to settle for, “I liked it a lot, most of the way through.” I hate artistic disappointment.
Wristcutters tells the story of Zia (Patrick Fugit of Almost Famous fame, who still looks too young to be drinking) after he slits his wrists (get it?!) over a girl. He ends up in some sort of purgatory, where “everything’s the same, just worse.” Once he hears that his ex-girlfriend has “offed” herself too, he and his awesome Ukrainian-rocker friend Eugene (Shea Whigham) set out in a broken station wagon to find her, driving in no particular direction through endless, dusty Americana roads. Along the way they find Mikal (the coltishly gorgeous Shannyn Sossamon)—the script is by a Ukrainian, based on an Israeli short story, so no one has a normal name—who is looking for the People In Charge because she thinks she is there by mistake. Off they go, on a story of life, love, magic. You know.
The best part of the conceit is the “world” the characters now inhabit, though it’s frustrating that the ‘why’ and ‘where’ of everything is left unanswered, which I suppose is the point. But it’s full of perfect little touches and bits of magical realism that ring true. In this place, things you drop in the car go into a black hole, and the headlights can never be fixed. Trains are tiny and run like little cars. Everything they pass is broken and abandoned. Manmade structures exist without people, just dropped onto the landscape. It’s a world of barely contained despair with little touches of whimsy.
Once the story is there, it’s content to hang out. Entranced with the beauty of the road trip movie, most of the slight running time is spent in the car, listening to rollicking Gogol Bordello songs on the crappy tape stereo (the character of Eugene is based on Eugene Huntz, frontman of the Ukranian “gypsy punks”). Sometimes it feels like a Beckett play, as these people have no purpose and nothing to do. But a movie like that is pretty insubstantial, and thus the weakest link here is the love story we all saw coming from a mile away, which leads to the profoundly unsatisfying, literally deus ex machina conclusion. You had such a good idea, why did you have to make it typical and silly?
Fugit is great, making the realistic funny and the ridiculous deadpan—a sympathetic, hipster sad sack. The rest of the cast, which includes Tom Waits and Will Arnett, also fill their roles with quirk, except for Sossamon, who is just hot, though profoundly, gum-chewingly annoying, in that indie romantic-comedy way.
There are a few gorgeous cinematic moments of empty open spaces and stillness. It’s a movie full of moments that unfortunately don’t really come to a coherent whole, or much of a point either.
The whole thing is aiming for “poignant and quirky,” but occasionally slips into “treacly and banal.” In the end, it sits comfortably as “winsome and droll.” It’s enough to like and to enjoy, but not enough to love.
