>>REVIEW
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
STARRING Annette Bening, Joseph Fiennes, Evan Rachel Wood, Alec Baldwin and Joseph Cross
DIRECTED BY Ryan Murphy
Open’s Friday, October 27
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In an era when maudlin flatulence such as Garden State or The Squid and the Whale are considered masterpieces, the recipe for making a "serious movie" is open source – have a gentle, middle-class, white teenage male discovering his parents’ flaws and imperfections; run two or three arbitrary sequences in slow motion; have plenty of close-up reaction shots scored with contemplative pop ("Daddy, are you leaving us?" soundtracked by the song Benny and the Jets). The only way in which the excruciating Running with Scissors differentiates itself from the genre is by introducing a streak of misogyny so bilious that it makes Hustle and Flow read like a tract from Gloria Steinem.
Based on the memoirs of Augusten Burroughs (played capably by Joseph Cross), Running with Scissors tells the formidably irritating story of young, gay Augusten’s quasi-abandonment to an Addams Family-like clan led by a creepy psychoanalytical patriarch named Dr. Finch (Brian Cox). Finch is abusive, manipulative and eccentric – at one point summoning his family (including his mousy hausfrau wife, his sometimes-idiosyncratic, sometimes-crazy children) into the bathroom in order to note how the coils of his turd point heavenward, a good omen for the family. Augusten’s idiotically unstable mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), is Finch’s unquestioning, devoted patient. Oh, those silly girls!
Between her woman-hating roles in this steaming heap as well as in American Beauty, Bening may just go down as the Stepin Fetchit or Mantan Moreland of what could be characterized as a minstrelsy of femininity; as Fetchit and Moreland did for African-Americans, Bening creates debasing caricatures of womanhood that serve only to dehumanize and humiliate. Here, she’s a monomaniacal space-case who thinks she’s a poet; her mental illness and her self-absorption are indicated by, among other things, her emerging lesbianism and her self-perception as being oppressed. Throughout the picture, women are alternately laughable or contemptible, and always pitiable. Ultimately, the only redemption to be found for females is in "conventional" motherhood.
This is Girls Gone (psychologically) Wild, but worse; at least the DVDs of drunken spring-break revelers are recognized as trash and are marketed as such. There’s a well-worn cliché in criticism that says that a terrible work that is honest about its artistic poverty (a Weekend at Bernie’s, say, or Gremlins 2) is far better, far nobler, than a piece of crap with pretensions to greatness. That particular cliché was invented for Running with Scissors. |
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