E-Mail This Article to a Friend Suicide for beginners? Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself Written and directed by Lone Scherfig. With Jamie Sives, Adrian Rawlins, Shirley Henderson, Lisa McKinlay, Mads Mikkelson, Julia Davis, Susan Vidler, and Gordon Brown. A THINKFilm release (109 minutes). At the [Copley Place and the Harvard Square and in the suburbs.]

Danish director Lone Scherfig’s previous effort, the semi–Dogme 95 2000 film Italian for Beginners, was a dark comedy with three deaths and lots of romance. Her latest, Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself, has just one death, but its romances are more problematic and its comedy is darker still, with dying a metaphor for the inability to communicate that was the title metaphor of Italian for Beginners. Although Italian appeared in Competition at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival and won the Silver Bear as best film from FIPRESCI’s international panel of film critics, Wilbur was relegated to a "special screening" at last year’s Berlinale, a decision that flummoxed Screen magazine and many observers.

Maybe it’s the title, which Scherfig appears to have had some difficulty over (one alternative was just Wilbur). The film is set in present-day Glasgow, where Harbour (Adrian Rawlins) runs a used-book shop and his brother Wilbur (Jamie Sives) works with children. It opens with Wilbur coming into his flat and turning on the gas, but not before calling Harbour, who hightails it over there just in time. Shortly afterward, Wilbur complains, "It gets more and more humiliating every time I survive." "You phoned," Harbour points out. "You didn’t let me finish," is Wilbur’s reply.

Wilbur never manages to finish his suicide attempts — when at one point he jumps into the Clyde, the water goes only to his knees. We’re told that when he was five, his mother kept trying to come home from hospital when she wasn’t supposed to, and since he knew she wasn’t supposed to come home, he didn’t let her in when she knocked; the next morning they found her frozen to death on the doorstep. Scherfig doesn’t mean us to take this story as an explanation — rather it’s symptomatic of how her characters regularly fail to connect, or connect in ironic ways. (In Italian for Beginners, new minister Andreas asks church verger Beate whether she’s married; "No," she answers, "but I’m taking ‘Italian for Beginners.’ ") When single mother Alice (Shirley Henderson) shows up at the bookshop and makes a connection with Harbour, it seems that Wilbur, like his mom, will be left out in the cold. But then Alice makes a connection with Wilbur as well, and Death forsakes one brother for the other.

Harbour’s reaction to the news that he has pancreatic cancer is to disconnect; he doesn’t tell Alice and Wilbur, and when he finds a description of chronic pancreatitis, he tries to convince himself and his doctor (Mads Mikkelson) that he has only that. Wilbur is a master of pick-up lines like "You’ve got a hair sticking out of your nostrils" and "I’d have bought a dog if I wanted my ear licked." The doctor gets upset when Wilbur throws Brussels sprouts at him in the cafeteria. Sometimes it seems Alice’s daughter, Mary (Lisa McKinlay), who calls Harbour her "lighthouse," is the only grown-up in the movie. Even Alice, who saves Wilbur twice (once when Harbour falls apart), is discountenanced at Mary’s birthday party: "The children are bigger than I expected," she says, and, "That tall girl is looking at my tights in a totally weird way." The children, for their part, all notice the spot on her sweater and mention it to her.

Truth hurts, as Moira (Julia Davis), the leader of Wilbur’s suicide-survivors’ group at the hospital, discovers. "I’m sure we’ve all grown very fond of Wayne over the past few weeks," we hear her tell the group, and then, a few minutes later, "I’m sure we’ve all grown very fond of Wilbur over the past few weeks." But she’s the one who makes Harbour face reality, first at the Chinese restaurant when she gushes over how well Wilbur, Alice, and Mary are taking Harbour’s illness (he hadn’t told them) and then at the hospital when she gushes over how well Harbour is taking the hopelessness of his condition (the doctor hadn’t told him). Her reward the first time is to be excused from dessert; the second, Harbour offers her his tea cake and some romantic advice (note also how he sets the doctor up with hospital cleaning lady Sophie).

Scherfig’s own connection with Glasgow isn’t total: the hospital seems more Scandinavian than Scottish, and in a city whose two football teams are Catholic-Protestant polar opposites, there’s no mention of religion, not even a hospital chaplain for the dying Harbour. But like her Norwegian contemporary, Liv Ullmann, she makes good filmmaking look easy. Everything that’s important in Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself is encapsulated in the film’s last few seconds, when Wilbur, Alice, and Mary descend the hill from the cemetery: Alice making physical contact with Wilbur, Wilbur drifting away, Alice persisting, Wilbur acceding. It’s all about learning how to live.