RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
By
Tasha Chemplavil
Arts Editor - The Rice Thresher
Film critic for Las Vegas Weekly
Film critic for
www.theflickchicks.com
tchemp@gmail.com
Off-kilter humor dominates almost charming Running With Scissors
Based on the best-selling memoir of Augusten Burroughs, Running with
Scissors chronicles Burroughs’ adolescence after his family falls apart and
he is sent to live with his mother’s eccentric therapist.
It sounds like a bizarre premise because it is.
Ryan Murphy, the film’s director and screenwriter, is no stranger to bizarre
storylines — he created the unpredictable television show Nip/Tuck. But
while Running with Scissors’ various oddities are entertaining, they lack
the cohesiveness necessary to keep the viewer engaged. Moviegoers are left
floundering to make sense of the string of inane situations.
Augusten (Strangers with Candy’s Joseph
Cross) serves as his mother Dierdre’s (Being Julia’s Annette Bening) sole
confidante, egging her on in her narcissistic dreams of poetry-writing fame.
The problem is that Dierdre is not a good poet. So when her literary
aspirations start to become more important to her than her scotch-swilling
husband (The Departed’s Alec Baldwin), the couple splits, leaving Augusten
in the hands of Dierdre.
Dierdre turns out to be completely insane. She decides she cannot handle
raising her son anymore, so she sends him to live with her therapist, Dr.
Finch (Match Point’s Brian Cox) and an unorthodox clan of crazies. Finch’s
wife Agnes (Vallen’s Jill Clayburgh) eats dog kibbles; his favorite daughter
Hope (Infamous’s Gwyneth Paltrow) selects random words from the Bible in
order to make life decisions, and his other daughter Natalie (The Upside of
Anger’s Evan Rachel Wood) is always dressed for a disco-dancing hooker
convention.
Natalie befriends Augusten, introducing
him to her “adopted brother” Neil (The Merchant of Venice’s Joseph Fiennes),
a thirty-something schizophrenic who embarks on an affair with the
adolescent Augusten.
Thrown into this freak show, Augusten is doomed to a life of maladjustment.
As he gets accustomed to the dishevelment and absurdity of the Finch
household, Augusten becomes close with Natalie and Agnes, looking to them
for some semblance of familial stability amidst the madness.
Bening’s turn as the lesbian narcissist Dierdre and Cox’s take on the
oddball patriarch Dr. Finch are the real reasons to indulge in this carnival
of inanity. Their performances almost make the strange situations
believable. Dierdre’s descent into madness, expressed as sexual confusion,
is an intriguing spectacle. She induces empathy despite her incompetence.
And Cox’s no-holds-barred commitment to Finch’s various obsessions — his
dilapidated house, his heaven-sent bowel movements and his sacred
masturbatorium — make one question who really belongs on the therapist’s
couch.
Running with Scissors is not for
everyone. The string of zany incidents is far from being mainstream, and the
humor is more off kilter like I Heart Huckabees than the accessibly quirky
The Royal Tenenbaums — uncomfortable and disturbing at times but genuinely
funny. At the very least, the film manages to provide an escape from the
average person’s reality while offering a cautionary tale about the evils of
poetry.
