WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF begins with a light touch, ends with a hammer blow. Ah, I think, at last a film with the courage to laugh at death while looking it straight in the eye, to derive its humor from a wellspring of suffering, which, after all, is the best, truest form of humor. But the dead-pan gallows humor, elegantly understated, flat and utterly unadorned, subtle and evanescent, evaporates somewhere in the middle, as breezy absurdity succumbs to a grinding Hallmark-greeting-card, art-house sermon on the Meaning of Life, to What IT Is All About. The film too neatly summarizes itself when one of the characters says, "It's good when people who have no one find someone."<br /><br />Wilbur indeed wants to kill himself, tries and tries again, so that you immediately understand from the onset that the point of the film will be his finding a reason not to. Fine, it's a conceit. The characters are fetching enough, and, lo and behold, intelligent things come out of their mouths. Wilbur (Jamie Sives), with a certain curl of his lip, conveys a hint of the insouciant rakish charm of Robert Downey Jr. The love interest (Shirley Henderson) combines a waif-like vulnerability with a gnomish sexuality. Her daughter (Lisa McKinlay) is adorable yet completely natural. Absurdist touches are provided by a chain-smoking psychiatrist (Mads Mikkelsen), whose utterly world-weary expression and flat tone of voice never change, and a casually addled nurse (Julia Davis), à la Lillie Tomlin. There are even a couple of memorable images, such as a gaggle of giggly birthday-party girls in frilly white seen from above amid the dusty earth tones of a used book store.<br /><br />The trouble is with Harbour, Wilbur's brother (Adrian Rawlins), who's so self-effacing as to serve as a Sunday school sermon. Such concocted altruism will put a crimp into any free flight of imagination -- only the unself-conscious are funny. Although the movie momentarily loses momentum here and there, particularly when the psychiatrist and Harbour on separate occasions take time out to discuss the grim pathology of their family histories, it breathes its last somewhere in the middle when the focus shifts from Wilbur to Harbour. Without giving away the story, I can only say the symmetry is too neat, the plot too didactic and planned, the brothers too diametrically opposed, one rising, the other sinking, as if on a seesaw.