Ah, what to do when bad titles happen to good movies. Really good movies. Those movies that have you muttering five days later, "Damn, that was a good movie. I have to catch that one again!" But then you remember the awful title, and think, "How can I get people to want to see a film with such an awful title?" So you write about them.

WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF is the latest outing by Danish director Lone Scherflig, whose last film was the well-received Italian for Beginners. Harbour (Adrian Rawlins), a relentlessly kind and cheerful Scotsman on the cusp of middle age, manages the rather chaotic used bookstore in Glasgow left him by his father. His main purpose in life, however, seems to be rescuing his "wee brother" Wilbur (Jamie Sives) from repeated suicide attempts. Wilbur, repeatedly rescued from the brink of death and nursed back in hospital to physical health, begins to note that "it gets more humiliating every time I survive." Even his fellow participants in group therapy have had just about enough of him, with one suggesting, "Why don't you just die and give someone else a chance."

Wilbur works marginally at a nursery school, where he is beloved by the young children in his care because he's just a bigger version of themselves, and women seem attracted to his refusal by live up to any kind of social norm. Terrified that one day Wilbur will succeed at one of his suicide attempts, Harbour convinces his brother to move in with him in the apartment above the bookshop.

When Harbour marries the somewhat odd young single mother Alice (Shirley Henderson), the couple, Alice's inevitably precocious daughter Mary and Wilbur establish a relatively happy, if unconventional family in life -- and Wilbur begins to feel the embers of life taking over his despair...until a secret Harbour has been hiding comes to light.

WILBUR..., the creation of a Danish Dogme 95 director as portrayed by a Scottish cast, carries strong influences of both cultures, for all that the story need not take place in either. While its presentation is more polished than the Dogme movement would dictate, the film has that kind of dark, almost Bergmanesque melancholy; leavened by the kind of wry comedy that has sprung out of Scotland in recent years. Because of the Scottish influence, it's all very wee and twee and wry and spry and colorful and all those things we associate with films set in the British Isles when they don't involve kings cutting the heads off of people who get in their way, but the Danish melancholy keeps the endeavor from turning into Ned Devine Wants To Go Far And Away To Kill Himself and End My Life So Far. There is not a moment of WILBUR... that you don't see coming a mile away, but the cast is so good and the production design so richly textured that you don't care.

This film will inevitably be compared to Ken Lonergan's You Can Count On Me, with Wilbur as a somewhat more humorous, albeit suicidally ideated, version of Mark Ruffalo's chronic screwup; and Harbour standing in as a kinder, gentler version of Laura Linney's Sammy. Yet where Lonergan's film had a clever and original script and richly layered characters, WILBUR must rely solely on its cast and the impact of its production design in order to transcend the fact that the script breaks every "show, don't tell" rule in the book.

Harbour tells us (via Alice) what Wilbur's primal trauma was, but aside from his repeated suicide attempts, Wilbur comes across as no more depressed, let alone suicidal, than your average brighter-than-average cynical observer of the absurdity of life in the contemporary world. But he's so damn charming, and so bloody amiable, that you shrug your shoulders and you don't even care. The apartment in which this unlikely family makes its home is so cozy and warm, with lots of puffy pillows and puffy comforters and puffy mattresses and even puffy wood trim, that the claustrophobic eccentricities of its denizens and their odd family dynamic seem normal. The bookstore is so scruffy and dilapidated, and so obviously right out of an Edward Gorey illustration that you don't care that no one could possibly make a living out of selling books like "The Joy of Pickling" to people looking for books by Kipling.

Adrian Rawlins, his appearance in Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves making him no stranger to Dogme 95, garbles his accent horribly for the first third of the film, when he finally gets the hang of it. Yet he does a wonderful job of portraying a simple, very kind, good man who ultimately has to take on a role in his family very different from the one he's always had. Shirley Henderson, a fascinating wee actress (sorry) with a characteristically squeaky voice who has done terrific character turns in films as diverse as Topsy Turvy, The Claim, Trainspotting, and Bridget Jones' Diary, finally snags a lead here as Alice, the sacked hospital janitress who becomes Harbour's wife and plays an important role in Wilbur's life as well. In this film, her character doesn't have much to do other than be a catalyst between brothers (though she's hardly the femme fatale that this kind of love triangle ordinarily requires), and she has a certain Jennifer Jason Leigh sullenness that makes the character somewhat less likeable than she should be. Yet she makes the most of her few Big Scenes, and has a nice chemistry with both men. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen makes the most of his screen time as the utterly deadpan yet painfully shy Dr. Horst, and Julia Davis is amusing as an unpredictably-coiffed Amazonian nurse who fancies Wilbur.

Ultimately, however, what makes WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF worth seeing is a terrific breakout performance by Jamie Sives, yet another of those failed footballers who finds a second life in film. In his first feature role, Sives imbues Wilbur with charm, cockiness, vulnerability, narcissism, sexiness, and even arguably a touch of autism. Sives, who bears a sometimes disconcerting resemblance to Hank Azaria, also has the kind of roguish, can't-take-your-eyes-off-of-him appeal that Colin Farrell used to bring to his early roles before he started believing his own hype. Sives' wonderfully expressive face and near-perfect comic timing make you forget that almost no character motivation has been written into his role.

The first quarter of the year is traditionally the dumping ground for studio garbage that's just taking up space. The good news is that it's also the time of year when smaller distributors can manage to obtain theatrical space. In recent years, word-of-mouth groundswell hits such as Bend it Like Beckham (2003) Y Tu Mamà También (2002) and Memento (2001) made their debuts in March. On this page, I'm doing my part to add WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF to that list.

-- Jill Cozzi

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