Director: Bob Byington
Writers: Bob Byington
Stars: David Krumholtz, Martin Starr, Olivia Thirlby
Synopsis: Man-baby Lousy Carter struggles to complete his animated Nabokov adaptation, teaches a graduate seminar on The Great Gatsby, and sleeps with his best friend’s wife. He has six months to live.
What would you do if you had six months left to live? I think this is something we all think about. There is a kind of freedom in the impending doom. Would we spend all of our savings? Spend time with loved ones? Or something darker. Would we push social mores and acceptability? Or is it some devious crossover between all of these? There are a lot of directions one can go in this circumstance. Lousy Carter makes many of these choices, perhaps a few too many, despite its scant runtime.
Writer and director Bob Byington does have a secret weapon at his disposal. The grungy charm of David Krumholtz is on full display here. As the eponymous Lousy, the movie follows him from stem to stern. This aforementioned charm is completely necessary, because he is about to make, well, lousy choices. He is able to wave away the morality due to a combination of maternal mistreatment and his death sentence via mystery diagnosis.
Briefly, Lousy Carter was a promising animator and, on the strength of that, was given a position at a college teaching English, specifically “The Great Gatsby.” Yes, it is silly that he is teaching an entire course on one book in a graduate program, which the film gently pokes fun at. His dream is to create an animated Nabokov film, which sounds like, to put it likely, a difficult sell. But this is really all means to an end type plot material. It allows him to crush on his young student, Gail (Luxy Banner), who almost steals every scene she shares with Krumholtz. Unlike most minor characters in a film such as this, she seems to have a full interior life, and that is almost solely to do with her performance. She plays a mixture of disgust, interest, wariness, and amusement with Lousy and his obvious attempts to ingratiate himself to her.
There is also an odd subplot which features Lousy sleeping with his best friend’s wife. Said best friend, Kaminsky is played by Martin Starr and is quite funny, but let’s face it, if you’ve seen his monotone delivery in Silicon Valley, among other performances, then you’ve seen this one too. There’s a few running gags here that never really catch on. No one, including his own wife, can quite remember his first name and there is no idea of actual friendship between Kaminsky and Lucky. This is played for laughs that never really arrive. The criminally underseen and undercast Jocelyn DeBoer (watch Greener Grass immediately) in her role of Kaminsky’s wife, Olivia, is giving her all, but there’s not much for her to grasp on to.
But the film really soars when it is focused on Lousy’s considerable neuroses. This is compounded in scenes with the incomparable Steven Root, playing his Jungian analyst. Root, obviously having a grand time, puts on a wildly stereotypical Freudian style accent, while matching his demeanor and seated position to a perfectly placed photograph on the wall behind him. These scenes are not breaking new ground, but it definitely allows playfulness and an insight into Lousy’s mildly deranged mind. It is not surprising that a character in analysis has a widely difficult relationship with his mother (Mona Lee Fultz) and his sister (Trieste Kelly Dunn). Allowing Krumholtz to riff and engage completely with this man who is clearly avoidant, forces the slight empathy needed towards a man who is trying to have sex with a student, not doing his job, and let’s not forget, having sex with his best friend’s wife.
Although I enjoyed watching Lousy Carter, it does feel like this could be a truly great short film. It finds itself stretching credulity with its characters, but never to the point of snapping completely. As mentioned, much of this is due to Krumholtz and Banner. His consistent attempts to woo her, combated by her clear awareness and edge, has moments of pure mastery. It should be noted that Byington’s script is sharp and incisive in its best moments. There may not be quite enough meat to chew on in Lousy Carter, but sometimes those few bites make it worth the cost of the meal.
