Brilliantly written by Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, Scherfig’s early-on hilarious, eventually poignant Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself takes place in Scotland rather than her native Denmark. Harbour and Wilbur are brothers. Both parents are deceased; Wilbur, the younger of the two, is especially haunted, even traumatized, by their mother’s death when he was a small boy. Wilbur is a pre-school teacher; Harbour runs the secondhand bookstore in Glasgow that he inherited from their father, although perhaps the dying man may have meant to leave the shop to Wilbur, his favorite. (At least Harbour tells Wilbur this.) No matter; Harbour adores his brother, whom he is terrified of losing. Wilbur, you see, wants to kill himself and keeps trying again and again.
Harbour and Alice (Shirley Henderson, terrific), a discharged hospital janitor with an eight-year-old daughter, Mary, fall in love and marry. Alice brings order to the shop’s messy inventory. Wilbur also moves in, at Alice’s gracious suggestion, so that Harbour can better keep an eye on him. All four inhabit cramped quarters attached to the bookstore. Wilbur and Alice fall in love, and Wilbur becomes increasingly responsible once his brother is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Having lost his taste for suicide, Wilbur even tries saving a self-drowning man.
This is an exceptionally warm, lovely, humane comedy in which things have to work out in life or not at all. From having been, briefly, technically dead after one of his suicide attempts, Wilbur knows that only “blackness and silence” await people after the end. The last time that the brothers are together, before they hug each other beyond depth or measure, Harbour expresses to Wilbur the movie’s theme: “It’s nice when people can get together when they have nobody else.”
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WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF (Lone Scherfig, 2002)
Brilliantly written by Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, Scherfig’s early-on hilarious, eventually poignant Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself takes place in Scotland rather than her native Denmark. Harbour and Wilbur are brothers. Both parents are deceased; Wilbur, the younger of the two, is especially haunted, even traumatized, by their mother’s death when he was a small boy. Wilbur is a pre-school teacher; Harbour runs the secondhand bookstore in Glasgow that he inherited from their father, although perhaps the dying man may have meant to leave the shop to Wilbur, his favorite. (At least Harbour tells Wilbur this.) No matter; Harbour adores his brother, whom he is terrified of losing. Wilbur, you see, wants to kill himself and keeps trying again and again.
Harbour and Alice (Shirley Henderson, terrific), a discharged hospital janitor with an eight-year-old daughter, Mary, fall in love and marry. Alice brings order to the shop’s messy inventory. Wilbur also moves in, at Alice’s gracious suggestion, so that Harbour can better keep an eye on him. All four inhabit cramped quarters attached to the bookstore. Wilbur and Alice fall in love, and Wilbur becomes increasingly responsible once his brother is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Having lost his taste for suicide, Wilbur even tries saving a self-drowning man.
This is an exceptionally warm, lovely, humane comedy in which things have to work out in life or not at all. From having been, briefly, technically dead after one of his suicide attempts, Wilbur knows that only “blackness and silence” await people after the end. The last time that the brothers are together, before they hug each other beyond depth or measure, Harbour expresses to Wilbur the movie’s theme: “It’s nice when people can get together when they have nobody else.”
Like this:
This entry was posted on January 1, 2008 at 12:33 am and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.