Review of Running with Scissors (2006) by Markb. — 15 Dec 2006

If you want to argue that American Beauty was an overrated, superficial wet firecracker tossed at white bread suburban America, with nothing especially new or insightful to say, I might still socialize with you.

..but NOT if you blame Annette Bening. She gave one of the most subtle, underrated film performances of the 1990s, making the seemingly one-dimensionally neurotic, materialistic upper-middle-class housewife/ real estate agent Carolyn Burnham a lonely, tragic figure worthy of our compassion rather than our derision and reminding us of the film's admionition to "look closer"; the slow disintegration of the Burnhams' marriage was just as much Lester B.

's fault as Carolyn's, and in the final image of her we see how much she truly loved him. Bening lost the Best Actress Oscar to Hilary Swank's gender-bending portrayal of Brendon Teena (Teena Brendon?) in Boys Don't Cry, and 5 years later, Bening's deliberately broad, wonderfully entertaining work as a theatrical grande dame in Being Julia was beaten by a last-minute groundswell for Swank's plucky boxer in Million Dollar Baby.

In Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' autobiography, Bening, possibly anticipating a third showdown with Swank (for The Black Dahlia?!? Fat chance!) combines BOTH performances, and the result echoes Faye Dunaway's infamous caricature of Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest; it's awful.

Sadly, this site's anonymous poster might just have nailed it when he or she sarcastically claimed that Bening might have engineered some contractual agreement to have x number of prescribed nervous breakdowns inserted into the picture; the result is a performance that, except for an early scene at a writers' club meeting where Bening's Deidre Burroughs eviscerates a fellow member, is completely superficial, monotonous and ineffective.

..everything her work in American Beauty was NOT. She plays young Augusten's psychotically neglectful mother who dumps her son (Joseph Cross) into the even more dysfunctional household of her psychiatrist (Brian Cox) and his more sympathetic but seriously damaged family, resulting in a textbook illustration of your choice of the cliches "out of the frying pan into the fire" or "the cure is worse than the disease".

Fortunately, our protagonist finds friendship (Evan Rachel Wood) and hope (Jill Clayburgh, playing Cox's disshevelled, seemingly beaten-down wife who turns out to be less pathetic than you'd originally guess; if you don't want to hug her at the movie's abrupt but surprisingly touching finale, then let's hope the theater you're watching this in really DOES have an in-house doctor on hand to check your pulse!) Cross is a typically forgettable young lead, but the other three, though excellent, can't overcome Murphy's highly contrived, compromised approach to his tough material.

He wants to make a gritty, disturbing, in-your-face independent-type movie that confronts the effects of serious mental illness on families head-on, but he keeps hedging his bets by inserting sitcom-style one-liners in the midst of his material.

This occurs in scene after scene; you can almost hear the offscreen rimshots. I'm fully aware that Burroughs himself, a very funny writer, has a great gift for finding humor in the darkest recesses of personal despair (his followup book, Dry, deals with his alcoholism in much the same way); this is, of course, one of the most admirable of human abilities but in Murphy's very heavy hands it continually comes across as a series of phony, inorganic concessions to the audience.

Or, to put it another way, running with scissors isn't all that bold or daring an act when you're constantly running with corks on the tips of the blades.