Running with Scissors (2006)

Load of rubbish!!

Fantastic!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Before I bought this, I was intrigued to know how they could possibly have filmed the book accurately. They didn't. The book portrayed Burroughs' journey into and through adolescence gradually, describing repetitive, strange behaviour patterns in both Burroughs and his mother Deirdre, and using these to give the reader a depth of understanding of the path to the mid-teen Burroughs described towards the end of the book. There is no way that some of the events which are graphically described in the book could be shown in the same way in the film, but altering or redacting the events as extensively as has been done for the film severely reduces the viewers' understanding of Augusten Burroughs. That said, the humour which I saw in the book is at least partly still there (though truncated) and the film thus could possibly have the power to do for the mental health care profession what M.A.S.H. did for war.

RWS utilises a great support cast (Cox and Bening) to prop up a wonderfully weird ball of head zapping expression. The intense film follows a single child, ?, who is a young gay man left by his splitting parents in the hands of a wacky psychiatrist and his non conventional family. The premise of the film is a idiopathic mother that brings her son into a world of psychology and disorganised abnormality.This film was praised for its individuality, ambition and the few points that stick out as funny, but it is a grueling tightrope walk of a watch (verging between madness and genius). For me the film was just too wacky to be enjoyed, and whilst it has moments of amusement (I.e the mastabatorium) and clever observations into characters, it is too dramatic a drama to be credible. It was based on a complicated book and some of this was lost, but other bits captured and improved.

The title suggests something edgy, something bold, something dangerous, something interesting. Alas, Running with Scissors is a monumental bore; a dispiriting and inconsequential film detailing wacky, zany, trippy, kooky or any adjective ending in 'y' ("e"), people going through hardships for our black amusement. As the film rambles on down a tangent of sprawling content and uninvolving, borderline psychotic people, it got more grotesque and less interesting. The film is devoid of any sense of comedy; humour; study; substance or intelligence, a witless, pathetic effort in its attempts to document the falling apart of a dysfunctional suburban family and the supposed rehabilitation that the mother and son of that unit go through in another family who're even more dysfunctional. Terribly directed; grossly uneven in tone; a film that makes no attempt to garner anything out of its impressive cast; obsessed with painting alienating and unsympathetic portraits of the central characters, whom we ought to be behind but just cannot stand when on screen for longer than a few seconds, as well as just being generally repetitive when it isn't either cataclysmically eccentric or 'pull your hair out' annoying; we have, in Running with Scissors, one of THE misfires of recent years.The film covers young Augusten Burroughs, of whom wrote a book in 2002 detailing his exploits as a young child of divorce growing up with psychiatrist Dr. Finch (Cox), himself of whom struck me as someone that either belongs on the couch or in the padded room rather than be allowed to treat patients in either locale, and his family in wife Agnes (Clayburgh) and daughters Natalie (Wood) and Hope (Paltrow). We begin in 1972, and young Augusten is just a child as his parents argue and bitterness resonates. The year of 1972 is brightly lit, their home colourful and quaint but underneath father Norman (Baldwin) is a dishevelled teacher whom enjoys a drink and mother Deirdre (Bening), whom will unwelcomingly feature much more later on, is a writer that cannot quite nail what she wants to do linked to magazine The New York Publisher. When the film flicks forward a few years to 1978, everything is less rosy in its colour palette and cinematography than what it was and while Augusten is older, the parents have stuck to their prior guns in their animosity with the desaturation of the home locale crucial in that Augusten is perhaps older and now able to notice the sorts of behaviour his parents engage in than what he was when he was in his infancy.What transpires from here is a divorce and the moving out of Deirdre and Augusten to the aforementioned Finch family; thus kick-starting a spiralling, tumbling, falling decline into all things sordid and nasty for either of these two, whilst Norman is seemingly off unaffected dating other women. This new family is a rag tag bunch; a group whom live in their own filth as it apparently pains them to tidy up and freely hurl insults at one another. The fact the film thinks these sequences are funny is unfortunate, the oddball tone it instills into proceedings coming back to trip the film up when we're lead to believe it now wishes to flick into a tale of a sordid descent down into a lifestyle of booze; cigarettes and homosexuality on Augusten's behalf, all whilst he's still relatively young. Where divorce and dysfunctional living are adult; mature and serious items that need proper attention, Running with Scissors laughably believes some brief excursions into underage drinking and a little sub-plot to do with a boyfriend will suffice in detailing the harsh realities of what happens to a young male mind in the fallout of what transpires in the boy's childhood.The thread bare plot, running on a rather dull premise, combined with an ensemble cast of some of the most unlikeable; most disgusting; most unrelatable characters ever put together for a film results in a near excruciating watch. Where we're systematically asked to laugh at all this off the wall, zany content in-which-nobody-really-knows-what's-going-on-and that's-apparently-really-funny(!) but then bring everything down a notch or three for Augusten's own decline in well being as we weep for the failed writer in Deirdre, we are left agasp at what's left in front of us. The film has none of that measured, slow burning maturity of something like 2004's Imaginary Heroes as a family gradually comes apart at the seams following something more tragic than a divorce in a suicide; and the blame, whilst I have not read Burroughs' book which may be the tale delivered in an equally misguided, equally adolescent manner, has to fall to American director Ryan Murphy, who adapted said text and, crucially, has since gone on to carve somewhat of a career within the medium of television. In between having his characters pause every now and again so as to spout daft philosophical musings amidst the eccentric babbling and charging around, Murphy really jumps the shark when he has his homosexual lead plus boyfriend go to see a "French" film high on "metaphorical" content because, as we all know(!), males that crave something a little 'higher' in their cinematic diet than the norm are grossly confused with their sexuality. In short, it is ridiculous; as is the film as a whole as is the fact we're expected to find any of these people interesting; their tales dramatic and the way the film goes about telling them engaging.

I haven't read the novel. In fact, I hadn't heard of it, the suspiciously extraordinary life it describes or the controversy that evidently surrounded the release of book and film alike. I don't know if it is true or not, if he experienced all of these things. That's not what I'm here to determine. What I will tell you is that this, while it may not be for all tastes, is an interesting tale and oddly engaging in spite of how difficult it can be to relate to at times. The situation is foreign, living in this bizarre household, abandoned by the mother. I was impressed with the uncompromising psychological accuracy and harshness, and how every single character is so completely human. The cast is great, and they all deliver compelling performances; none of them feel as though they were given the role on account of star power. I did not realize Cross had such range from Untraceable, and am glad that he got to show it here. The music is well-chosen. This has good writing. I haven't watched anything else by Murphy, but I like his style, and will be on the lookout for other efforts by him. This genuinely engaged me, and situations that have been seen before didn't feel clichéd. There is a ton of strong(at times explicit) language, a bit of disturbing content and a little sexuality in this. I recommend it to anyone who can imagine liking it. 7/10