Lousy Carter

“Kids started calling me Lousy Carter when I was in the golf team at high school...it obviously wasn’t meant to be a complimentary nickname but it stuck,” says our hero at the start of this tale. A little while later, a hospital receptionist calls out for “Lazy Carter”, and he responds all the same. He’s about to go into a consultation that will change his life – by letting him know that he doesn’t have much of it left.

JM Barrie has a lot to answer for. If he had known how common boys who don’t grow up would become, would he have restrained himself? He was, of course, writing about premature death, and Lousy is fortysomething, but that doesn’t mean that any noticeable process of maturation has occurred. One wonders if impending death will encourage it. Spoiler: it doesn’t.

An amiable little comedy which occasionally takes a sideways swipe at more serious issues, Lousy Carter provides pleasant enough distraction in the moment but gives viewers very little to take away. There’s some attempt at specificity in its setting – the protagonist is an academic, tutoring a small group of disinterested students on The Great Gatsby, to which he does not do justice. He dreams of being a filmmaker. The young woman with whom he sets his sights on having a life-affirming and inappropriate affair is one of his students, but she’s not remotely interested. Everything else is by the book. The long-suffering but still affectionate ex. The troubled relationship with his best friend. The selfishness which he will never entirely see for what it is. One might edit scenes from a dozen such films together without viewers realising that they weren’t following a single story.

In the lead, David Krumholtz exudes a kind of likeable rubbishness which makes him appealing company, though, again, he’s not someone likely to stick in the mind. As he bumbles through his daily routines, he encounters assorted low-key absurd situations. Director Bob Byington plays with the established language of terminal illness films, his slowly drifting camera looking at the ceiling or off into the distance, but one imagines that this kind of vagueness has always been a feature of Lousy’s life. The humour is deadpan. It will make you smile. That’s all.