Suicide: now funny, quirky

Since when is suicidal depression a quirky personality trait? I’ve always been under the impression that it is a crippling emotional problem, rather than a joke.

Wristcutters: A Love Story uses suicide as the main plot device; it is what transfers the main character to a whole new world. See, it seems that when someone commits suicide in the alternate reality of Wristcutters, instead of going to heaven or hell (or nowhere), they go to a drab, slightly crappy secondary world. I guess you could call it purgatory.

This world is solely populated by people who commit suicide–people who have found themselves in an even shittier existence. Needless to say, everyone lives a sad and quiet existence. But main character Zia (played by Patrick Fugit) wants more. He finds out that his former girlfriend (the reason he killed himself) also committed suicide. How convenient.

He then takes his friend Eugene (Shea Whigham), and they go on a road trip in search of his lost love. Along the way, they make another friend, this time a lovable lady named Mikal. She’s cute, endearing and in a perpetual search for the PIC (people in charge). She’s sure she is in the gray world of “suicide-land” by mistake, so the group goes looking together. But it turns out that finding anything is harder than it looks, because, duh, nothing is as it appears.

There’s a lot to hate about Wristcutters. Its premise is ridiculous and insulting, the tone is off-putting, and Patrick Fugit, best known for acting in Almost Famous, is weird looking. Despite it all, the movie is somewhat successful. Just ignore the first part of the title, “wristcutters,” and embrace the latter, “a love story.”

The acting here is open and welcoming, striking the quirky tone that so many modern movies have. Did you like Little Miss Sunshine? How about The Royal Tenenbaums? If so, you might like this as well.

The most interesting concept in Wristcutters is the idea of a world full of very depressed people. This wouldn’t be good, but it would have to be strange to live in a place where every single person’s frame of mind was the same.

Wristcutters is visually nice, capturing the drab attitude that I imagine a suicide purgatory would have. But that’s this entire movie. It’s nice, not interesting. It’s uninspiring, not transcendent.

In short, it’s exactly like the world it creates: hazy and unclear, but not entirely terrible. It’s not as bad as hell, but it sure isn’t heaven. Go figure.