Running With Scissors

Starring Annette Bening, Joseph Cross, and Brian Cox. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, October 27, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

In Running With Scissors, everyone seems to be wielding sharp implements except the one person who needed them the most: the editor. The movie, which begins with an appealing premise and is very well cast, is an appallingly bloated and self-indulgent mess of a movie.

Based on Augusten Burroughs’s memoir of an unusual 1970s childhood (if any memoirs can be believed anymore), Scissors stars the very 20-year-old-looking Joseph Cross as Burroughs at 14, when the lad’s suburban-boho mother (Annette Bening) and hard-drinking suit of a father (Alec Baldwin) really went for each other’s throats. Here, the confluence of mom’s grandiosity and her pile of rejection letters from the New Yorker (sample poem title: “A Poet’s Struggle”) has driven her to an unorthodox shrink, played with gusto by Brian Cox.

The good doctor is forthcoming to a fault. But even he has his limits, as we discover when he finds his grim eldest daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) curled up in the “masturbatorium” adjoining his office. Back home, in his nightmarish pink bungalow, the doc has another daughter, a sexy pre-Goth type (Evan Rachel Wood) with anger issues and a taste for anachronistic phrases (who said downsizing in 1978?), plus a frazzled wife (Jill Clayburgh) who hasn’t done the dishes since Watergate. And then there’s the adopted son (Joseph ?Fiennes) who isn’t allowed to sleep in the house for fear of everyone being murdered in their sleep. We should have been so lucky.

Adapted and directed by Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy, the movie is great fun while introducing these assorted nuts. But once Augusten gets dumped with the doctor’s family for the rest of his adolescence, Murphy has trouble sticking to a tone long enough to reward viewer investment. How are we supposed to feel, exactly, when the lad starts sleeping with the adopted brother twice his age? Or when the younger girl straps him in for some DIY electroshock therapy? How about when he goes to hair-styling school and gives a free makeover to everyone in the family except the one who really needs it, the scraggly-haired mom.

If any of this happened to the real-life author (glimpsed at the end of its very long two hours), one can see why he thought, “Hey, great material”. But on-screen, it just feels like a confusing mishmash of personal payback, two-dollar psychology, and kitschy wish fulfillment

It also seems warmed over from other, more stylish feel-bad movies, with Bening and Paltrow reminding us of their better work in American Beauty and The Royal Tenenbaums, titles it too closely resembles. In fact, this one wasn’t so much created as cut from whole cloth.

Comments