Running for the exits
After last week’s The Night Listener, here’s another bad movie based on a popular gay book. Running With Scissors is the Hollywood version of Augusten Burroughs’s bestselling memoir (a million copies sold), written and directed by Ryan Murphy, a creator of TV’s Nip/Tuck. If you find watching that show pretty hard going, then you mightn’t last the two hours that Murphy’s movie debut takes to unspool.
The blame doesn’t lie in the star-studded cast. Annette Bening deserved a Best Actress Oscar last year as the self-absorbed diva in Being Julia but she lost to Hilary Swank’s stunt casting in Million Dollar Baby (incidentally, Swank fans might enjoy her delightful performance in Freedom Writers, a feelgood MTV movie currently in theatres). There’s an element of Bening’s Julia in her role as Augusten’s mother, a delusional would-be poet who packs her 12-year-old son off to live for two years with her even more delusional psychiatrist, Dr Finch. Played by Brian Cox, the original Hannibal Lecter from Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Finch is obsessed with his patients’ bowel movements, freely dispenses Valium, and has a masturbatorium in his office suite.
Augusten’s nightmarish experiences in Finch’s ramshackle rubbish-strewn household are played for laughs but all you want him to do is escape. Mrs Finch (Jill Clayburgh) spends her time watching Dark Shadows on TV while eating dog biscuits. The oldest daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) makes all her decisions by pointing to random words from the Bible to guide her. Dr Finch’s adopted son, a 33-year-old schizophrenic played by Joseph Fiennes, commences a sexual relationship with Augusten, though the pedophile element seems toned down and less graphic than in the book.
None of these characters is remotely convincing and teenage Augusten (played by 20-year-old Joseph Cross) remains a blank observer of their transgressions and eccentricities. The most believable character in the movie is his alcoholic father Norman, played by Alec Baldwin, who baulks at Finch’s remedy for his crumbling marriage -“ daily five-hour sessions of psychotherapy. Lumbered with a crazy wife and a son (played as a small boy by Jack Kaeding) who sterilises and polishes his pocket money, Norman’s mixture of bewilderment and frustration rings true when he tells Augusten, I see nothing of myself in you, a scene that might strike a chord for many a gay son.
The main problem with the movie seems to be in the translation from page to screen. Augusten’s first-person narration makes him the main character in the book but he’s constantly upstaged by all the movie’s weirdos so we’re left with an episodic freakshow that strives too hard for laughs. In the end, a desperately unfunny cameo by the real Augusten Burroughs elbowing his movie counterpart off the screen comes across as charm-free self indulgence.
