Running With Scissors [2006] [Scissors Cover] [DVD] [2007]

I really wanted to see Running with Scissors when in opened in Britain last year, as I love the book. Unfortunately, it was only on for a week at a few screens in London before closing, and having bought the DVD I can appreciate why.

The book is Burrough's account of his childhood when his crazy mother leaves him to be looked after by her even crazier shrink and his family. It's a remarkable achievement as the author manages to make the often alarming events of his upbringing touching and funny.

The film, though an accurate (but abridged) reflection of the book, seems to miss out on the fact that it's supposed to be a comedy. This is chiefly because it makes Augusten's mother the focus of the plot, when in the book it's her absence which is the driving force. Annette Bening does a fine portrayal of mental derangement but only captures the flavour of the novel occassionally, in for example, a bizarre poetry-reading she organises for her would-be literary friends.

I liked Evan Rachel Wood's performance as Augusten's friend Natalie but she's only given a little screen time, when she should really be a central character. My favourite scenes in the novel - diving through the college waterfall and a trip whale-watching off Cape Cod - involve her but are omitted entirely here.

The only time the movie truly flickered into life for me was during the closing credits, when the real-life Augusten Burroughs stands next to the actor playing his young self. But this single moment of playfulness and humour (qualities seen repeatedly in the book), isn't enough to save a film.

Based on Augusten Burrough's best selling memoir, Running With Scissors would have to be one of the most under-rated movies of the year. Hammered by the critics when it first came out, the film actually features some fine performances from its talent and multi-faceted cast, and even though it's a little overlong, and less than perfectly focused, this is a compulsively watchable movie is best enjoyed by forgetting that it's supposedly all true!

The story centers around Augusten's (Joseph Cross) relationship with his mentally ill mom Deirdre, played with great veracity by the legendary Annette Bening. It's the early 1970's and Deirdre is just beginning to break into her stride as self-avowed feminist and poet.

Deirdre has decided that poetry is her gift the world and the fact that no magazine has bothered to print her verse shows that the world is engaged in a vast plot to deny her the fame and wealth she so clearly deserves. As she gravitates from an almost narcissistic personality disorder to manic-depression and then on to a type of passive aggression, she takes her anger out on Augusten's alcoholic father, Norman (Alec Baldwin).

Desperate for help, Deirdre ends up packing her poor son off to live with her quack psychiatrist with issues of his own, a sort of dementedly benevolent Rasputin-like character named Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) who divines the future from his bowel movements and hands out prescription drugs like candy. He lives in what seems to be a terminally dilapidated house, with the IRS always hot on his trail.

The poor Augusten has to cope, not only with Finch's detached and near-catatonic wife (Jill Clayburgh), who is devoted to eating cat kibble and watching reruns of Dark Shadows on television, but also his two very strange daughters, Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), a depressive who makes her decisions by choosing random words from the Bible and Natalie (Rachel Evan Wood) who unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Augusten with an electroshock therapy machine.

While light on plot, much of the impact of Running with Scissors comes from the dynamics that develop between Augusten and his very eccentric adopted family, and his efforts to reach out to Deirdre, as she steadily goes downhill, becoming addicted to prescription drugs, fanatically writing her poetry and desperate for recognition.

Augusten does connect with Dr. Finch's adopted son Neil (Joseph Fiennes) a 35-year-old schizophrenic former patient who lives in the garage, but even this doesn't come across as particularly healthy and is presented as the least of his problems.

About half way through the film, the tone changes, as writer-director Ryan Murphy sacrifices a type of dark and bleak humor for something more serious as we realize, that apart from Augusten - who seems to the unwilling participant in all this - the rest of the characters moving in and out of his life, are all seriously disturbed to say the least.

Even though its all supposed to be true - and I've never read the memoir, so I can't comment on how much of it was adapted for the film - it seems as though Murphy is at times straining to make this crazy quilt dramatically credible. Even so, when Bening is on the screen, all fired-up, giving the demented and self-deluded Deirdre everything she's got, the movie is totally compelling.

Whether she's setting the crockery out in the back yard to give it a moon wash, to wash the stains of Dr. Finch away, or fanatically making a collage out of her endless rejection slips, the actress is just so captivating that you cannot look away. Mike Leonard February 07.

This film was so nearly great, and I am not quite sure why it isn't.

Bening dominates the film, as Deirdre Burroughs, the failed poet and mother who turns to an insane and dominating psychiatrist for help, becomes hooked on prescription medication and abandons her child to him. She is by turns charming, beautiful, vicious, selfish, obtunded and psychotic. The brittleness, physicality and truth of her performance are brilliant.

The rest of the cast all put in good or great performances, in particular Agnes Finch, the downtrodden wife of the mad Dr Finch, Neil Bookman, the psychotic adoptive brother, who becomes Augusten's lover and Natalie, his desperate and insightful half-sister.

And yet despite the individual performances, this film never quite comes together, which is a great shame. It lacks neither character nor incident and yet it drags in the middle. There are scenes which will stay me, which made it worth sitting through and so I cannot say this is a bad film, just not as great as it should have been and so nearly was.