Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig pulled off a terrific coup last time out in the marvelous small comedy "Italian for Beginners," managing to create an ensemble of romantic lonely-hearts so accessible and sweetly moving that her film ranked among the year's best. In her new comedy-drama, the larger themed and scaled "Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself," she's gotten more ambitious, and though not quite in the league of her first outing, "Wilbur" is an often likable and at times moving film.

Wilbur (Jamie Sives) and Harbour (Adrian Rawlings) are brothers living together in Glasgow after their parents' deaths. Harbour takes care of business in the family's aging bookshop, while Wilbur repeatedly tries to take his own depressed life, even being forced out of his suicide-support group, never succeeding under the watchful eye of guardian angel Harbour. Their lives both change with the arrival of Alice (Shirley Henderson), a single mom who finds work in their bookstore and love in their home. To complicate matters, when love happens - it's quickly, unfortunately diffused by tragedy.

"Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself" is a more focused and serious drama than Scherfig's "Italian for Beginners." And though it begins slowly and gains ground steadily until its bittersweet conclusion, it remains a rather minor film that's well-intentioned, well-performed, well-made even, but predictable at times and rather conventional when it's all said and done.

I was disinterested in the first half of the film, as the two brothers shack up together after their father's death and Wilbur pulls sporadic suicide stunts. Although the attempts are seriocomic in nature, I felt there was something about him that was smugly unappealing and uninviting. Before the excellent Henderson, also effectively used in Michael Winterbottom's films, entered the picture, I couldn't have cared much less about Wilbur's struggles. They seemed calculated and more the delusions of a self-absorbed and somewhat uninteresting character, rather than the musings on life and death we might find in a richer film by Stephen Frears, which this at times resembles.

"Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself" isn't in the same league as the wonderful, heartfelt "Italian for Beginners" - indeed, few films are. But what Sherfig has created here is a film that is ultimately more satisfying for the sum of its parts - Henderson's moving turn, a beautiful musical score, an excellent supporting performance from Julie Davis as a concerned nurse, and resonant, ambivalent evocations about love and death - than for its acceptably competent whole.