Warning: Scene spoilers ahead Running with Scissors: A review
By Sunly Coo, Contributing Writer
When we were kids, our parents often kept us in line through constant reminders and reprimands. Such displays of parental concern are rare for the young Augusten Burroughs, who was raised by mentally unstable adults.
"How do I begin to tell the story of how my mother left me and how I left her?" Burroughs (played by Joseph Cross) asks at the opening of the film based on a personal memoir that shot to the top of the New York Times best-sellers list. The two-hour-long movie coproduced by Brad Pitt takes the audience through a dark, twisted world of dysfunctional characters: Augusten's alcoholic father, played by Alec Baldwin; his mentally unstable mother, rivetingly portrayed by Annette Bening; and her emotional crutch, a highly charismatic but perverted therapist to whom she would later entrust her child.
The mother, the dominant figure in Augusten's life, is without doubt the most interesting character in the film. Dierdre is a psychiatrist's dream patient, a complicated case of bipolarism, codependency, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur. Despite countless rejections, this unpublished poet believes she will one day stand in front of an adoring crowd at Carnegie Hall. Her worst failing though is not literary in nature, but maternal. Instead of packing his son's lunch and dutifully sending him off to school, she calls Augusten's teacher to say that he will be staying home to perm her hair.
Augusten is her personal assistant, cheerleader, and number- one fan. It does not take a degree in psychology to figure out who is really the parent and who is the needy child in this relationship. Dazzled by her flamboyant mother, the boy begins to dream of becoming like her. If she expressed her love for bright and beautiful things through striking outfits and a sunny-yellow home interior splashed with vibrant colors, the young Augusten manifests his by boiling coins and polishing them till they glowed. "I like shiny things," he says to his father, who seeks escape from his "not normal" family by drowning himself in a bottle.
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With a trail of rejection slips behind her and an inevitable divorce ahead, Dierdre seeks the help of Dr. Finch, setting into motion the spiraling descent of what was left of the Burroughs family. Actor Brian Cox uncannily brings to life the intense and disturbing therapist, so much so that the author was reported to find it highly stressful when he finally saw Dr. Finch on celluloid.
Deceptively paternal, the psychiatrist not only has no qualms taking sexual advantage of his vulnerable patients, he prescribes drugs with too much ease and dispenses irrational advice, like killing oneself, with an eerie certainty. It is hardly a surprise then that his own family is even more maladjusted than the Burroughses, their trash-filled home as messed up as the personalities that live there: the apathetic and unkempt wife who turns a blind eye to her husband's indiscretions, the father's favorite daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) who kills her cat in a perverse form of affection, the rebellious daughter who seems the sanest in the group, and the schizophrenic son who attempts to murder his old man. Into this strange, chaotic household Augusten is thrust by his mother who no longer wants the burden of taking care of her child.
This is definitely not a film for every adult. Despite a few funny and poignant moments, a mood of despair prevails throughout the film, becoming overwhelming at times that the viewer is tempted to turn off the DVD player. Perhaps that is the reason Running with Scissors never had a wide release here, if it had even been screened at all. Watching a convoluted, insular world of characters with tormented psyches is certainly not the Filipino audience's cup of tea. That is unfortunate because, for one, witnessing Augusten's self-liberation from his mother and Dr. Finch is worth sitting through a two-hour-long tragedy, and for another, Bening turns in what is probably her best work, one worthy of an Oscar.
The cleverly phrased title is a metaphor for Augusten's journey from childhood to the brink of adulthood. Indeed, Augusten stumbles through life with enough sense of a foolhardy child running around with a sharp object. But he is one of the rare few blessed with a strong survival instinct. His transformation from a passive doomed character to a hero in every sense of the word is both painful to witness yet ultimately cathartic.
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