Review of Running with Scissors (2006) by Dylan V — 08 Aug 2009

Film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' coming-of-age memoirs recounts his dysfunctional life with his mother and her shrink's family. As far as the film goes, the mood and characterizations were spot-on.

Speeding up the time-frame to place all the bizarre and sexually explicit events in the younger characters' adolescence was pretty much unavoidable, but I loved all the performances from the principal cast.

However, Ryan Murphy's screenplay falters as the film progresses. Like "Da Vinci Code," it starts of great, but gets lazy in the process and tries to condense everything to one scene and several lines of dialogue, when the book contained so much rich exposition (especially the inexplicably truncated ending).

With that being said, the changes themselves come off as a bit perfunctory and bog the pace of the film quite a bit. Still, it's worth checking out, but ardent fans (unlike myself) may be disappointed.