Mini-Review: "An Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist"

By Lindsay Eanet

Published Feb. 27, 2008

The existence of a "quarter-life crisis" has long been debated on MySpace online drama series and in John Mayer songs. The debate continues, briefly, in Owen Lowery's "An Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist," in which he, as both filmmaker and protagonist, drafts a list following a mental breakdown and a stay in the psych ward. The list? A year's worth of things he had been meaning to do-fight a shark, take a dump on Mount Rushmore, go hang gliding-as a means of staying alive.

The film is very real in documenting Lowery's highs and lows, and his actions on the list begin to parallel his emotional journey. Squirrel fishing (exactly what it sounds like) comes early, in the optimistic, good-natured stage of the film, and other wildly funny, raw sequences follow (the one of Lowery being shot with a tazer is a highlight). But as he delves more into his personal life, the fourth wall breaks down and what we get is a complicated, raw and beautifully honest picture of a man and his mission. The items on the list that deal with his past and his family, particularly where he gets a tattoo designed by an autistic cousin and takes his father to a recording studio to mix a song he wrote, are when the film is at its most touching, without the treacle. Lowery's film is never pretentious or self-indulgent and his introspection and insights on the human experience are enough to make Hamlet look like just another emo kid.

"An Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist" hardly has the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" ending many people may seek with the film, but Lowery's journey is easy for many of us, on the cusp of growing up and struggling with whatever issues, great and small, that the transition from adolescence to adulthood bring, to connect to. His story is simultaneously simple and complex, hilarious and wracking, raw and definitely inspirational. Even if he never does get to slap the President's ass.