STUDIO: Lionsgate
RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2008
STARRING: Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Shea Wigham, John Hawkes, Leslie Bibb, and Tom Waits
WRITTEN BY: Goran Dukic
DIRECTED BY: Goran Dukic
FEATURES: Audio Commentary with Director Goran Dukic, Actors Patrick Fugit and Mikal Portnoi Lazarev, and Producer Tatiana Kelly
Making the Final Cut: The Wristcutters Journey
Deleted Scenes
Director's Storyboard Look-In
Patrick's On-Set Photo Gallery

Where do we go when we die? That’s a question that’s been covered countless times throughout film history. But where do we go when we kill ourselves? Attempting to answer that is Wristcutters: A Love Story, a black comedy that details a road-trip through the afterlife. Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous, Saved!) plays Zia, who slits his wrists at the start of the film in reaction to an unrequited love for a woman named Desiree. He then finds himself in some sort of purgatory, populated entirely by victims of suicide - a strange place where beverages are never cold, smiles are physically impossible and horrendous scars hint at everyone’s cause of death. Zia soon learns that in response to his own demise, Desiree has also offed herself (the term of choice among the deceased). So he decides to take off on a quest to locate her. Joining him on his journey are two new friends: Eugene (All the Real Girls’ Shea Whigham), the hard-drinking, Russian rocker, and Mikal (The Rules of Attraction’s Shannyn Sossamon), the fiercely independent hitchhiker. Along the way, they encounter a of bevy of quirky characters, including Abraham Benrubi as Zia’s uptight, Austrian roommate, Tom Waits as the wizened leader of a junkyard commune and Will Arnett as "Messiah"... Yes, you read that correctly.

The concept of such a place, as well as Zia’s troubles, comes from a short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret. It’s an interesting idea and one that automatically provides the filmmakers with a number of interesting questions to ponder. But those questions are only addressed intermittently. The lengthy drive gives the characters plenty of time to discuss their metaphysical surroundings; Eugene is apathetically content, Mikal is anxious to escape, insisting she’s there by mistake, and Zia isn’t quite sure what he thinks. But after those initial impressions are expressed, the movie doesn’t dig much deeper. It seems more concerned with basking in its own oddness, intent on presenting an endless parade of wacky characters in surreal situations. This is fun for awhile, but its aimlessness eventually leaves us wondering what the point of it all is supposed to be.

On a more positive note, however, the movie has a striking look to it, separating scenes in the afterlife from those in normal life through the use of a washed-out color scheme for the former and a vibrant palette for the latter. The film paints a clear, but desolate picture of its world, as the characters drive an old beater across a limitless desert, past broken-down carnivals and service stations. There’s also some terrific music in the film, which includes a genre-hopping, multi-cultural score by relative newcomer Bobby Johnston and songs from gypsy punks Gogol Bordello, whose frontman is a friend of director/screenwriter Goran Dukic’s and served as the basis for Eugene. And Whigham deserves special mention as well, for crafting that character perfectly - the boneheaded buddy you love to hate and bring along simply to ensure the road-trip never gets dull.

The DVD itself contains a fair number of extras, but little that’s likely to interest anyone other than superfans of the film. The commentary track features the voices of Fugit, Sossamon, Dukic and producer Tatiana Kelly, but it consists mostly of anecdotes and inside jokes from the shoot. The disc also has a making-of documentary, which does an adequate job of answering some basic questions in a much shorter amount of time: "Where did the title come from?", "How did Tom Waits get involved?" and "What’s been changed from the short story?" Other extras include a set of storyboards for the film’s climax, a gallery of Fugit’s on-set photography and some deleted scenes (a few of which might’ve helped to explain some of the film’s more perplexing plot points, had they been inserted). Yet even with the addition of all the extras in the world, it’s hard to imagine Wristcutters: A Love Story adding up to much more than an offbeat road movie. The afterlife portrayed in the film isn’t a terrible place to wander around for 90 minutes - but don’t expect to come back with any new appreciation nor understanding of the here and now.