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RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
Written & Directed by: Ryan Murphy.
Produced by: Dede Gardner, Brad Pitt, Brad Grey.
Director of Photography: Christopher Baffa.
Edited by: Byron Smith.
Music by: James S. Levine.
Released by: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
Country of Origin: USA. 122 min. Rated: R.
With: Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood, Alec Baldwin, Jill Clayburgh, Joseph Cross & Gwyneth Paltrow.
DVD Features: “Inside Outsiders” cast featurette. “A Personal Memoir by Augusten Burroughs” author interview. “Creating the Cuckoo’s Nest” set design featurette. Spanish, Portuguese & French audio. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese & Korean subtitles.

If you’re reading this for the forthcoming DVD, you may have missed the reviews at the time of the film’s theatrical release. I’ll recap them for you: the critical press almost unilaterally panned Running with Scissors, putting it on par with Snakes on a Plane, though with less fanfare. So I’m going to take the opposite route and argue why it’s worth adding to your Netflix queue.

But first let’s talk about Augusten Borroughs, whose famously dark memoirs provided the source material. Like the movie, the book follows Augusten’s 1970s childhood in which his mother forfeits her only son’s guardianship to her therapist, Dr. Finch. The reserved boy, played by Joseph Cross, comes of age with a family consisting of the crazed and selfish therapist, his forgotten wife, and an assemblage of siblings who live in squalor.

Unfortunately, most of what made the book standout was glazed over or simply cut from the screenplay. Augusten’s psychotic mother, Deirdre (gloriously played by Annette Bening), is still married to her husband at the beginning of the film. His existence might as well have been imagined in her head in the memoir. Augusten is no longer raped by Finch’s other troubled male ward Bookman (Joseph Fiennes), two decades Augusten’s senior, and their subsequent relationship in the film is not emotionally dominant/submissive so much as mundane and vaguely crazy. Worst of all, Cross plays Augusten like a relatively normal teenager; the book finds him to be almost as selfish and troubled as the other characters.

As a comedy, the film’s laugh out loud funny. Much of that is due to director Ryan Murphy’s cast, who are all remarkable. Dr. Finch, played by Brian Cox, blends his character’s jolly Santa Claus qualities with Finch’s gradually revealed narcissistic tendencies. Bening’s Deirdre is an explosive, drug-addled monster, though pitiable and lovely enough for Augusten to want to remain with her until he can no longer endure her.

And there isn’t enough that can be said for Finch’s family. As the doctor's daughter Natalie, Evan Rachel Wood has remarkable comic timing, which was not as evident in her earlier films. Natalie's older sister Hope is wonderfully played for laughs by Gwyneth Paltrow, whose appearance here is partly to blame for Scissors’ early unwarranted comparisons to The Royal Tenenbaums. And Finch’s wife, Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), is so distant from each family member that she might as well be their maid. Clayburgh brings emotional depth to a film that otherwise has a hard time delineating itself from dark comedy and lighthearted tragedy.

There are too many brilliant moments in each of their performances that make you pity them and hate them, laugh with them and laugh at them. While it is a large problem that Augusten blandly exists only to react to his off-the-wall milieu, every other character maintains the book’s balance between laughs and suffering. The film rejoices in a sense of humor that many films attempt but fail at portraying: the peculiar. Rather than a strict adaptation of a beloved complicated book, debut feature film director Murphy succeeds in cutting his teeth, knowing well enough that any good comedy has underlying pain. Zachary Jones
February 6, 2007