|
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS Send This Review to a Friend
It’s wacko time at the movies. “Running With Scissors” deals with characters so off the wall that the word dysfunctional is hardly adequate. What do you make of a psychiatrist who keeps a “masturbatorium” for relaxing and examines his excrement to determine a course of action? That’s just two of the oddball aspects of writer-director Ryan Murphy’s film based on the memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, who tells how he survived his early life and is portrayed on screen by Joseph Cross. The people depicted are not those with whom one would care to get cozy. Yet there are compensations, thanks primarily to the acting.
Annette Bening, worth watching in virtually anything, is Augusten’s basket case of a mother, who fancies herself a writer waiting for the world to discover and becomes increasingly delusional. As Dierdre Burroughs, Bening succeeds in conveying her border line emotional existence, veering between trying to cope with the reality of her life and family and losing her grip on herself and what’s whirling around her.
Dierdre plunges into a relationship with her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), who fleeces her monetarily and dominates her to the point of getting her to send Augusten to live in his household. Jill Clayburgh, deliberately looking haggard and miserable, gives a touching performance as the charlatan doctor’s unhappy wife. They have two daughters, Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood) and Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow).
Joseph Fiennes plays Neil, who is among Finch’s patients, and Neil and Augusten become lovers as part of the journey the author takes. Alec Baldwin is self-centered and detached as Dierdre’s husband, but why not? He can’t deal with her as a nut case or with his son’s problems. Meanwhile, apart from her relationship with Finch, Dierdre finds a new love interest.
The only one who seems reasonably rational is Augusten, but after all, he wrote the memoirs on which the film is based. Good for him.
Some of the situations are so outlandish that they are funny, but it involves laughing at people whom you would still rather keep at a distance. A TriStar Pictures release.
|