RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

Director: Ryan Murphy (1st major feature film)
Starring: Annette Benning, Joseph Cross, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood, more

I can picture many of the actors in Running with Scissors, Annette Benning and others, before they signed up for this film. Their agents bring them a script of a bestseller, with Brad Pitt as a producer. They read it, see the showy, ridiculous, off-the-wall characters and think these might be some of those juicy roles that just might garner award consideration. I don't know if they realized during the shoot just how wrong they were, if they realized this film was a trainwreck. I'm sure they realized after the fact though, because this film failed in a lot of ways. It crashed, and it crashed magnificently. The cars skidded off the track and piled on top of each other. Then there was a massive explosion and the mass of metal and passengers caught on fire. Then the train rolled flaming down a hillside, sliding into a deep cold lake. And then a monster killed off the few survivors who didn't get crushed, exploded, suffocated, or drowned. Okay, I may be overdoing this a bit. This was not a good movie, but it's not like this was Ishtar or anything. To be perfectly honest, as film failures go, this one was better than most. It was a failure by talented people.

Running with Scissors is the screen adaptation of the bestselling "memoir" (and I emphasize the apostrophes on that) of Augusten Buroughs, an extravagently imaginative young man who was adopted by his mother's therapist. In my opinion, the most important thing to know about the real author, and his character in the film, is a line he delivers early on. "I'm more like my mother... I want to be famous". You see, Mr. Burroughs has been sued by the family that raised him, claiming defamation. They're saying that most of his memoir is pure invention. Now I certainly can't say for certain who's right in this familial melodrama, but from what I saw in the film, it certainly reeked of fakery. The story felt like an invention of somewhat shouting out to be famous. Even if I'm wrong, it doesn't excuse the story itself.

Young Burroughs (Cross) has an hysterically absurd mother (Benning), convinced of her own importance as a poet, yet drowned in her own failures. His father is a distant alcoholic, although a more or less decent guy as Alec Baldwin plays him. Soon his father leaves, and his mother starts a dependent (and sexual) affair with her therapist (Cox). This psyciatrist is the kooky patriarch of the kookiest of families. Imagine the Adams family without the walking hand or hair-covered cousin.

Unable to cope with the responsibility of motherhood, Benning gives away her child to the therapist. His family includes a socially impotent mother who chomps on cat chow while watching old movies, an older sister (Gwynneth Paltrow) who channels the thoughts of her cat (before she kills it), and for some reason wears only victorian skirts and blouses, a tarted-out younger sister (Wood) who's more or less your average unhappy rebel teenager, and a schizophrenic older adopted brother with whom young Augustin starts a homosexual affair.

In a nutshell, these people are thoroughly messed up emotionally. They do weird things that we're supposed to find cute, and then other weird things that are just disturbing. Augusten tries to reconnect to his mother, but it doesn't work out. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a catharsis of any kind in this story, or even a climax, but at the end young Augustin moves to New York. And the film's over. He gets away from the madness I guess. So, my four-word film review: "houseful of nut jobs".

This film just doesn't work, and as is usually the case, the writing and directing is to blame. The story doesn't have enough continuity from scene to scene, it just jumps from one weird episode to another. The characters are so off-the-wall as to be nonsensical. The characters I saw on screen should have been hospitalized, every one of them. As I said regarding the climax, there was no story arc per se, it was just an episodic tale of weird folks. As I understand it, the book is written as journal entries of Burroughs. This film occasionally has Augusten narrating into his journal, but strangely, not very often. That seems to me to be the connective tissue the story needed, the 'recounting' of his life so to speak, but it wasn't used very effectively. Nope, this was not a good movie.

Standouts: Good actors in bad roles. Benning, Baldwin, Cox, Paltrow, Fiennes, Wood and Cross are all good actors and were interesting even in the bad story.
Blowouts: You've got to blame the director when a film fails like this one did. I wonder if Mr. Murphy will get another chance at at directing a major film.

Grade: C-