Released: October 27, 2006
Director: Ryan Murphy
*****
A movie based on a best selling memoir filled to the brim with accomplished actors. Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood, Alec Baldwin, Gwyneth Paltrow. A sublime performance by Joseph Cross. Pretty good art direction inside a house stuck in time. How the hell does one of the mind's behind Nip/Tuck spew out such utter drivel? Surely someone looked at the dailies and had second thoughts about what was being committed to film. If not, everyone involved needs to be fired.
When Deirdre Burroughs (Bening) gives custody of her young son Augusten (Cross) to her therapist, the unscrupulous Dr. Finch (Cox), the boy's life takes a strange turn. As if catching his mother locking lips with a poetry friend (Kristin Chenoweth) wasn't bad enough and his father (Baldwin) not wanting anything to do with him wouldn't scar him for the rest of his life, the Finch household throws Augusten to the dogs. He not only starts a comatose affair with another patient's child (Fiennes), but delves deeper into a criminally incompetent family.
I have nothing but unrequited bile for Running with Scissors. Not content to squander an A-list cast, the film is nothing more than the most outlandish facsimiles of a childhood the now-adult Burroughs can come up with. Pompous, full of hyper-hyperbole and lacking any sense of reality, how is the audience supposed to relate, let alone become invested in the proceedings? It's as if Burroughs took a painful childhood and morphed each event into such a distorted version of the original its unrecognizable. Maybe that's the point, that the doctor's palatial home was never painted pink, yet that is what Augusten remembers it being to make the memory go down easier. Is it at all possible Deirdre lets her therapist adopt her son, falling into a continuing spiral of drugs and psychotic episodes? In some reality, it makes pseudo-sense. In the reality we all live in, it doesn't. Someone would have stepped in: child services, the cleaning lady, a family friend. Someone. Anyone.
Running with Scissors is Burroughs jab at the people who shaped his life. Quite possibly the only one he can possibly have, considering the fates of the characters involved according to the end credits. Estrangement, death, bankruptcy...it's a recurring theme. The last, specifically, tends to describe the finished film: creatively bankrupt. It doesn't take any skill to be mean, vindictive and cruel. It takes much more talent to create a satire, one that hangs together as a complete story with a brain and a heart instead of becoming a series of events Augusten remembers. Self indulgent, nearly interminable, offensive to the intelligent... If this is truly a straight adaptation of the source material, it might have been better served staying on the page. This is just a grotesque embarrassment for everyone involved, one or two good performances be damned.