The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 10/26/06 Section: Arts and Entertainment

Media Credit: Sony Pictures Joseph Cross and Annette Bening practice their baffled, disappointed faces for the premiere.

Dysfunctional casts of characters are not rare in contemporary cinema. Unfortunately, many recent releases have neither improved upon the paradigm nor been subversive enough to experiment with the already exhausted conventions. Running with Scissors continues this streak of weak poseurs.

As an eccentric ensemble piece, it is missing the absurdist comedy of I Heart Huckabees and the peculiar pathos of The Royal Tenenbaums. This dull result is even more depressing when considering how fey and colorful Augusten Burroughs memoirs, from which the film is based, are.

Ultimately, the filmmakers accomplish one ostensibly infeasible task: they render Burroughs' life unremarkable.

The film opens with a voiceover identifying itself, "My name is Augusten Burroughs." A teenage Burroughs (Joseph Cross) concludes this brief introduction by noting, "I guess it doesn't really matter where I begin because no one is going to believe me, anyway." It is not the strange events that occur, however, that makes this production unbelievable; it's the way the filmmakers have taken candid accounts and neatly packaged them for easy digestion that strains this toothless film's plausibility.

Running with Scissors revolves around a sensitive, aptly angst-ridden teenage Burroughs. He can thank his mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening, taking full advantage of her character's psychosis), for such an unconventional, tumultuous childhood.

Deirdre, a vastly unstable and acerbic narcissist with delusions of grandeur, divorces her husband and selfishly decides that her quirky psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox, who is usually fantastic but is merely serviceable here), should adopt Augusten so she can concentrate on her emotions and writing. Dr. Finch has two odd daughters (Evan Rachel Wood and Gwyneth Paltrow, trying hard to give dimension to their one-note characters and failing) and an adopted, perilous thirtysomething son (Joseph Fiennes). Thus begins Augusten's wayward trip through life and his struggle to cope with uncontrollable events.

The director of Running with Scissors, Ryan Murphy, has previously worked in television-he is credited as creator of the provocative slice-and-dice FX series "Nip/Tuck" and the teen cult (yet hardly classic) show "Popular." Perhaps that's why, after moving to a new medium, the film is so jarringly episodic and lacking in cohesion. It lumps along from one scene to the next, pointing out another bizarre, yet candy-coated, vignette from Augusten's memoirs.

Continued...

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