FROM DEPRESSION TO LOVE, SICKNESS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

NOT JUST your average life-affirming suicide comedy, ``Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself'' would like to be an unconventional love story, too. Harold and Maude must be spinning in their graves.

Against all odds, there's some emotionally credible originality rattling around Lone Scherfig's uneasy combination of tame ``outrageous'' humor and sentimental disease-movie conventions. As is often the case of late, leading lady Shirley Henderson saves the weird, adorable project with one of her patented portrayals of a passive loser who learns to assert herself in a unique, subversive way. She keeps the movie watchable whenever the outre and whimsical threaten to overcome it.

Though she originally set ``Wilbur'' in her native Denmark, Scherfig transferred the action to Glasgow, Scotland, and translated the movie into English. However, the same strange mixture of extreme depression and naive frivolity that marked Scherfig's Scandinavian hit, ``Italian for Beginners,'' remains recognizably intact.

The title Wilbur, played by Jamie Sives, is one of those serial suicide attempters who never quite succeeds. This is due, in part, to the man's basically immature nature; he doesn't so much want to kill himself as get attention without having to make mature commitments. The kids at the preschool where he works love Wilbur because he's just like one of them.

But a bigger reason why Wilbur isn't dead is his elder brother, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins), who always gets there in time to turn off the oven or bandage the wrist. Following Wilbur's latest attempt, Harbour moves his brother into his own apartment, adjacent to the used bookstore they've recently inherited from their father.

The store is not a real going concern, but it is pleasantly haunted by Henderson's Alice. She sells Harbour books left in the waiting rooms of the hospital where she cleans. He is most smitten by her since, although apparently better adjusted than Wilbur, he's not in his brother's babe magnet league (the movie's funniest recurring bit involves the nurse in charge of his support group, played in just the right register of controlled desperation by Julia Davis, constantly hitting on Wilbur).

Like most Henderson heroines, Alice starts out as no prize. Sullen, inarticulate and not even good at mopping up blood, she also has an inexplicably bright, preteen daughter, Lisa McKinlay's Mary, whose father is never mentioned. But Harbour's love gradually brings Alice out of her shell-shocked shell - and then some. When a hidden medical crisis can be disguised no longer, the family dynamic takes socially unacceptable but personally rewarding turns.

Real sensitivity and affection for these quirky characters doesn't quite counteract the feeling that a lot of what happens in ``Wilbur'' is contrived and manipulative. Like many a Danish filmmaker, Scherfig once subscribed to the Dogme rules for minimalist, honest cinema. ``Wilbur's'' co-writer, Anders Thomas Jensen, scripted some of the better films to come out of that movement, such as ``Mifune'' and ``The King Is Alive.''

But except for Lars von Trier, whose remarkable ``Dogville'' also opens today, the Dogmetists have evolved into an eager-to-please pack. Scherfig wants you to love her suicidal depressives in the worst way, even while she pretends to make something dark and wicked out of their predicament.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF - Two and one half stars

(R: language, nudity)

Starring: Adrian Rawlins, Jamie Sives, Shirley Henderson, Lisa McKinlay.

Director: Lone Scherfig.

Running time: 1 hr. 49 min.

Playing: Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle Sunset 5, West Hollywood; Edwards University 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Scottish black comedy turns into disease-of-the-week romance halfway through. Formulaic yet odd.

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Photo:

Shirley Henderson, left, and Jamie Sives are part of a seemingly impromptu family in ``Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself.''