Running With Scissors

Dysfunctional family movies are my cinematic bread and butter. No matter how many I see, I’m always up for yet one more. Having read and enjoyed Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running With Scissors, I knew that the film would have family dysfunction galore. In fact, dysfunction on top of dysfunction with a little extra dollop of dysfunction added for additional flavor. What I inexplicably failed to take into account is Hollywood’s tendency to sap every last bit of juicy goodness from high quality source material. You’d think at some point I’d learn.

The film version of Running With Scissors begins with a brief introduction via voice-over narration to the life of young Augusten Burroughs. Very, very brief, as in almost nonexistent and certainly without value. It seems to be there to let us know that what we are about to see will be outrageous. Yeah, thanks for that – but if something is outrageous, I should be able to discern that without being told beforehand. Blunder number one, thirty seconds into the film. Oops.

What follows is the story of Augusten’s childhood. His mentally ill mother, alcoholic and uninvolved father and the psychiatrist who compounds every misery suffered by this child by a factor of ten are all plopped in front of us for our, um, entertainment, I suppose. I have to say, it just doesn’t work out.

The critical misjudgment on the part of screenwriter/director Ryan Murphy is having this story told only in the first person from the viewpoint of Augusten. The result is a series of vignettes detailing a life filled with all sorts of abuse at the hands of the adults entrusted with this child’s care. Bizarre and unusual abuse, but abuse all the same, with no adult filter through which to view it with some type of sardonic wit to make it more palatable.

I hate to even say it, because this device so often goes wrong, but this film needs voice-over narration throughout. That scant piece in the beginning should have been dropped in favor of a running commentary from an adult Augusten. It is this perspective that lends the book its dry humor. From the view of only the child, the laughably bizarre simply becomes the horribly depressing. Of course the child does not see the warped humor of his situation – only with years of perspective (and undoubtedly years of therapy. Or drugs. Or both) could these insane situations be turned on their ear and made into something sad and strange and oddly funny. Unfortunately for all of us, Murphy chooses not to take this adult perspective and the film becomes only maudlin, weird and oftentimes just outright ugly.

There are a few good things here – most of them from the cast and those responsible for the set design. Joseph Cross is an adorable Augusten, with deep dimples that surface when he’s truly happy – this kid has a face that could light up a room. He handles the material he’s given quite well, and we do end up liking the character as a result. Annette Bening as Dierdre Burroughs (the mother) also fares well under the circumstances. Her character is seriously mentally ill and Bening plays it to the hilt, not holding back when her character needs to be ugly and abrasive. The rest of the cast is simply undone by the screenplay. Brian Cox as the psychiatrist Finch is just given too much creepy weirdness to make anything coherent of the character, the same for Jill Clayburgh playing his wife. Gwyneth Paltrow gives the older Finch sister a good shot, as does Evan Rachel Wood the younger, but neither can tunnel from beneath the material to make the characters work. Joseph Fiennes as the “adopted” Finch brother Neil Bookman does manage to create some tension and an occasional chuckle, but he, too, is hamstrung by the screenplay.

The set design for Running With Scissors is one of the reasons I wanted to see the film in the first place. I wanted to know exactly how they would handle the crazy settings described in the book, and they did so with a fair amount of both whimsy and faithfulness to the spirit of the source material. The Finch house is as much of a nutty, crazy disaster as the early Burroughs home is a sterile, hostile disaster. The juxtaposition is really quite impressive.

But neither actors nor set designers can rescue what a screenwriter/director has fatally doomed. Without some perspective from an adult Augusten, Running With Scissors is maudlin and depressing, without the benefit of being an outright drama. It’s comedy dressed in funeral garb, too dark to be funny even for me, a connoisseur of the gloomy. An apt comparison might be imagining A Christmas Story without the overlay of adult narration. It would suffer tremendously from the loss of that nostalgic adult wit, as Running With Scissors suffers from the loss of adult perspective and dry humor. This may be a dysfunctional family movie, but it’s too dark to be funny and too bizarre to be taken as a straight drama. It’s unfortunate, but I can only recommend you read the book, the film is nothing but a pale, dysfunctional imposter.