“Wilbur” won the Discovery Jury Award Best Screenplay at the 2004 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, and Audience Award at the 2003 Hampton International Film Festival. It was also an official selection at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival.

After the success of her 2000 Dogme film "Italian for Beginners," writer/director Lone Scherfig moved to more dramatically satisfying terrain with this oddball comedy-drama. In "Italian," a weighty series of contrived tragedies converged to form a feel-good, audience-pleasing tale of love and friendship, but here Scherfig and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen (co-writer of the Dogme dramas "Mifune" and "The King Is Alive") stick with three offbeat, intertwined characters, and a more measured pace to balance some tragic lances with darkly comedic moments.

Originally called "Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself" in Denmark and England, the film benefits from excellent performances by its Scottish cast (all free to use their colourful brogues), and Danish thespian Mads Mikkelsen as a dryly acerbic German doctor, well familiar with Wilbur's long history of suicidal attempts and viciously funny rants. The kitchen sink timbre is also enhanced by the superb blending of Danish and Scottish locations to evoke a working class Scottish town.

Sundance's DVD nicely showcases the gorgeously cloudy cinematography, and the film's clean stereo mix benefits from Joachim Holbek's score, which captures Wilbur's deep-rooted sadness, and the absurdity of his occasional sudden need to off himself.

While a concise biography on co-writer/director Lone Scherig offers a brisk overview of her intriguing career, the DVD would have benefited from direct interviews with the film's writers and core cast members. The film's superficial, dour subject matter is transcended here by superior acting and filmmaking, and some insight into the successful tactics to avoid maudlin melodrama would have boosted the DVD's supplemental content, alongside some notes covering its favorable reception at film festivals.

© 2004 Mark R. Hasan