LOUSY CARTER - Mark Reviews Movies

Lousy Carter, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2024

"Lousy" isn't the man's real name, thankfully, but it is how everyone has known and referred to him since high school. That's telling for obvious reasons, and Lousy Carter pretty much deals exclusively in the obvious.

Here's a guy, played by David Krumholtz, who's single following a divorce, in therapy, having an affair with his best friend's wife, only talking to his mother because she's stuck in a nursing home, and trapped in a past of some success that hasn't gone anywhere since then. Is any of this his fault? Lousy would argue it isn't, and doesn't that just sound like the most appropriate outlook from a man who has and has embraced such a nickname?

Writer/director Bob Byington's movie is technically a comedy, in that it features a lot of jokes, most of them revolving around how out-of-touch Lousy is and the way he lives his life with an absence of self-awareness, and keeps a perspective that feels as distant about everything that happens as its main character. It's tough to sympathize with Lousy, despite how much wry humor and sad-sack energy Krumholtz brings to the role, but in something of a miscalculation, it's just as difficult to see any of the characters surrounding him as anything other than jokes, too.

The whole movie feels like an exercise a tone that sees itself as above and beyond everything and everyone within it. Maybe that is how Lousy sees the world beyond himself, and if that is the case, it's only further reason why the guy is such a challenge to get to know and even consider liking.

Krumholtz, a long-time character actor, tries his best here, playing a college professor whose current class is teaching The Great Gatsby, a book most college attendees probably should have read and studied by this point in their lives, to a select bunch of disinterested students. His real passion project, though, is a return to making an animated movie, which he hasn't done in over a decade—when a project of his received enough attention to get him the teaching gig in the first place.

The plan is to adapt a Vladimir Nabokov novel, about an adult man who gets into a relationship with an underage girl. It's not the one you're probably thinking of, and that's why Lousy believes he might be able to get away with making the movie without obtaining the rights to the book.

None of this really matters, except to give us a sense of Lousy's early ambitions have turned to laziness. Most of the story sees him dealing with relationships he's currently in the act of sabotaging, ones that he previously ruined, and others that he almost certainly will wreck if given enough time. The big question is whether or not he will have that time.

He's diagnosed with a terminal illness near the start. The doctor gives him six months to live and additional fees to a medical bill that he couldn't pay before the diagnosis. What's someone in this position to do?

For Lousy, it's to keep teaching his class, where he meets Gail (Luxy Banner), a smart student whom he wants to photograph as reference for the movie he has now decided to make, to sleep with (since he has never done such a thing), or both. He gets the idea of having an affair with a student from his ex-wife Candela (Olivia Thirlby), who's mostly joking, because she knows Lousy too well to think he'd actually follow through on a plan.

Finally, there's Lousy's best friend and fellow professor Kaminsky (Martin Starr), and yes, Kaminsky's wife Olivia (Jocelyn DeBoer), who seems too intelligent to be with either guy, and Lousy have been having an affair for a bit. After one last dalliance, Olivia tells her husband, so the six-month death sentence might be shortened due to his pal's jealousy and anger.

Despite the underlying tensions and overt conflict of the setup, Byington's screenplay runs in circles around the same basic character-based and comedic ideas. Lousy is miserable, blames everyone—primarily his mother (played by Mona Lee Fultz)—for his state of mind and the general state of his life, and seems set on making everybody around him just as miserable, either through direct action or apathetic, above-it-all inaction, such as how he ignores repeated invitations to a high-school reunion from an old classmate (played by Macon Blair).

Some of it's amusing, mainly because Krumholtz embraces how pathetic the character is. The gag, though, is repeated so many times—not only through what happens, but also by way of plenty of on-the-nose dialogue—that it quickly becomes clear how thin the material is in terms of ideas and characters, as well as how limiting the distanced tone is in terms of letting any of these elements breathe.

For one thing, the movie's too brief for that, which seems almost an acknowledgment of how little there is to examine here. Mainly, Lousy Carter is repetitive in its methods, apart from a pair of darkly ironic punch lines that make us wonder if even Byington cares about his main character in any way.

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