A shaggy dog story about a boy, his mom and a house full of freaks, Running with Scissors assaults us with so many voices shrieking at each other that it's hard to resist the impulse to simply stick our fingers in our ears and shut it all out. The noise is deafening, the movie's tones conflict and collide like crazy, and the symmetry is all out of whack.
There's no telling what is supposed to be at the center of this film and what's at the periphery, but the din remains constant. Like a small child with ADD, Running with Scissors seems to lunge in all directions at once, making it hard to get a sense of where we're supposed to be focusing our attention. Sooner or later, you may find yourself not really caring.
Based on Augusten Burroughs' bestselling autobiography, Running with Scissors is the story of a kid growing up weird and aimless in the weird and aimless '70s. For young Augusten (Joseph Cross), even the comforts of family aren't much comfort at all: Mom (Annette Bening) is a seriously deluded, would-be poet spewing out bad, Sylvia Plath knock-offs about Death and the Universe; Dad (Alec Baldwin) is a sullen alcoholic who seems to have accidentally stumbled into the life he's leading; both of them have those pinched, blotchy faces that make them look like they spend a lot of time behind closed doors, plotting revenge on the world and crying.
Augusten's more drawn to Mom, though — from an early age, he's nothing if not a self-styled artiste himself, with a natural predilection for peculiarity (albeit without much of a handle on discerning actual talent) — so it's not too terribly traumatic for him when Dad eventually packs up and leaves. (The movie, on the other hand, really misses Baldwin when he's gone; his handful of scenes makes for an oasis of droll humor in the otherwise shrill cacophony of the film.)
It's only much later that Augusten comes to realize that Mom is a castrating, self-destructive monster and that Dad may have been the "normal" one in this scenario all along — something that the audience picks up on within the film's first few minutes.
Dad's exit roughly coincides with the entrance of the movie's unlikely father figure, a mysterious shrink named Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), who arrives at the Burroughs' home in the dead of night looking just like Max Von Sydow come to exorcise Linda Blair. Finch is actually here to exorcise the demons in Mom's head and, after an initial request for bologna with a side of horseradish, immediately prescribes massive doses of valium all around, and proceeds to attach himself to what remains of Augusten's family. It's around this point that Running with Scissors begins its rapid descent to hell in what is often described as a handbasket.
With his mother firmly under the spell of the Rasputin-like Finch (and on an increasingly hefty diet of meds), Augusten soon finds himself living under the doctor's roof, a ramshackle manor inhabited by too many cats and a menagerie of stridently dysfunctional family members that make the Royal Tenenbaums (or, for that matter, the Burroughs) look like the Cleavers.
Mrs. Finch (Jill Clayburgh) spends her days on the couch, glued to Dark Shadows and snacking on dog food; daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood) likes her electroshock therapy machine a little too much; eldest daughter Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow) communicates with a cat named Freud; Adopted Brother Bookman (Joseph Fiennes) hears voices telling him to kill his father. Everyone dresses like bag ladies-and-gentlemen, and, when the chaos abates for even a moment, you'll likely find a little kid pooping in a corner somewhere for no particular reason.
About an hour in, as the '70s give way to the '80s, several of the movie's main characters suddenly realize that they're gay, and these revelations become the movie's focus for a scene or two, appearing amid a series of extended and increasingly frenzied montages.
These montages aren't that different from what you'd find in any number of more conventional Hollywood movies, except that instead of montages of couples frolicking through the seasons or grunts being put through their paces at boot camp, Running with Scissors gives us montages of people breaking things and screaming. It feels a lot like eccentricity-on-demand, with a mix tape of '70s oldies (Average White Band, 10cc, Elton John, Phoebe Snow) providing the soundtrack.
To its credit, Running with Scissors attempts something fairly difficult, segueing between comic surrealism and painful psychodrama, but director Ryan Murphy (making his feature debut after a highly successful run on TV's Nip/Tuck) doesn't seem to have the firmest grip on his materials. The movie's mood swings feel almost arbitrary, the pitch is nearly always hysterical (which rarely translates as funny) and the writing simply isn't sharp or focused enough to supply the characters with the interior lives they so desperately need. Ultimately, we don't really care very much about anyone on the screen.
We're engaged by several of the performances (besides the excellent Baldwin, Bening and Cox are both quite good) and even sporadically amused by the sheer oddness of it all, but it's not nearly enough. It's hard not to admire a movie that devotes an entire scene to characters crowded around a toilet bowl discussing the hidden significance of a bowel movement — shot from the turd's point of view — but the film's shapelessness keeps us at a distance, and its stridency is ultimately a deal breaker.
And so Running with Scissors goes, veering from bleakest tragedy to oddball comedy, with the volume set permanently on high and only the most cursory attention to flow. We get a poignant confession from Bening's character quickly followed by the Python-esque gag of Dr. Finch in his "Masterbatorium," surrounded by pictures of Golda Meir and Queen Elizabeth; some Squid and the Whale-like attempts at social observation, followed by Paltrow pulling a Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and insisting she's turned the family cat into dinner.
At one point, Running with Scissors bombards us with a graphic suicide attempt, then swerves back to Comedy Central again for a bizarrely miscalculated practical joke by Wood's character, who pretends to have set her hair on fire.
"That was funny," Natalie browbeats the unsmiling Augusten, her intended audience, adding, "You should be laughing." But by this point, we can relate all too well to Augusten's blank stare. After an hour or more of navigating Running with Scissors' massive and apparently random leaps in tone and tenor, we know just how he feels.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.