Lousy Carter

Typically, when movie characters receive a terminal, or even just ominous, diagnosis, it becomes the impetus for change or self-reflection, like “Ikiru” (1952), or the chance to make a “Bucket List” (2007), or to ignore it completely and go by way of bacchanal a la Michael Douglas in “Solitary Man” (2009). But in “Lousy Carter,” none of those things happen. When its eponymous depressive literature professor (David Krumholtz) learns he has six months to live, he doesn’t ask “Why Me?” so much as figuratively shrug and say it figures. Though Bob Byington’s low budget indie has the feel of a Mumblecore movie, it’s more like a 90s slacker comedy, with unhappy academic types that tend to speak in withering putdowns, diagnose each other without necessarily understanding themselves, but if they had graduated from taking classes to teaching them. Nothing much happens, as the phrase goes, and as movies like these tend to, and yet “Lousy Carter” takes that notion of nothing much happening, turns it around, and makes it the point.

Lousy Carter, we learn, from sessions with his therapist (Stephen Root, affecting a German accent that seems to suggest we are supposed to take this all less seriously, not more), got his nickname as a kid and “didn’t mind it,” so it stuck, neatly encapsulating someone more than willing to drift along, unchanging. He teaches a graduate course on The Great Gatsby, but this barely factors into the plot, and he seems more into Nabokov anyway. Indeed, the one moment Lousy truly seems to light up is when he explains how the Russian author’s Laughter in the Dark was unappreciated in its time. Maybe that’s a warning sign. Given the character’s penchant for Nabokov, an estranged relationship with his mother (Mona Lee Fultz) and sister (Trieste Kelly Dunn), and his affair with the wife (Jocelyn DeBoer) of his colleague and ostensible best friend (Martin Starr), it is not easy to spend 90 minutes in his company. But that’s why you cast an actor like Krumholtz. So dignified in “Oppenheimer,” here he is deadpan, and not redeemed by it so much as made tolerable, even enjoyable. His sparring with Olivia Thirlby as his ex-girlfriend Candela becomes an amusing evocation of misery loves company. His eyes radiate self-deprecation with every line. “He’s an asshole,” to quote Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton” talking about someone else, “but he knows it.” 

A one-time animation prodigy, he has an idea for an animated movie based on Laughter in the Dark, and when Candela suggests he have an affair with a student as a kind of kiss-off to life, he winds up sort of heeding her advice by enlisting his pupil Gail (Luxy Banner) to help him make this movie. It’s a darkly comical skewering of the sort of so many six months to live storylines and so is the ultimate rendering of it. She is nonplussed by him and doesn’t take the bait, though ironically, he comes under suspicion of an age-inappropriate relationship, nevertheless, from the Provost (Randy E. Aguebor). It is real schlemiel sort of humor further reflected in how he confesses to never even getting the rights to Laughter in the Dark in the first place meaning his end-of-life desire is just a pipe dream. As Lousy himself says, “No one wants to see a film about a pedophile creeping on a young woman,” which is just about the most sardonic line possible, a movie character ruling his own movie out of order.