Signis

Running With Scissors

(JPEG) (US, 2006, d. Ryan Murphy)

What image does a title like Running with Scissors evoke? Something a bit mad, to say the least.

Which means that it probably is a very good title for this piece of cinema of the absurd.

There has been something of a fringe tradition of eccentric American films which not only highlight the absurdities of the human condition (especially the American variety) but also a tradition of films that take on the absurd in their style and ways of communicating characters and themes. To go back only over the last forty years, one might think of Dr Strangelove, Catch 22 and some of the oddities of the 1970s. In more recent times, Wes Anderson has created a niche for himself in this tradition with Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums (which seems something like a cousin to Running with Scissors) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

This is a memoir by Augusten Burroughs - who himself appears during the end credits with the actor who portrays him, Joseph Cross. The film begins preciously with his voiceover about his mother leaving him and his leaving his mother. There follows an introduction to his increasingly strange mother, Deidre (Annette Bening), a would-be poet who lives in her dreams of fame and success but whose appreciative audience is her little boy, Augusten, and whose unappreciative audience is her continually frustrated and now alcoholic husband (Alec Baldwin).

Annette Bening gives a tour-de-force performance as the mad and maddening mother, something like an amalgam of some of her impressive roles in American Beauty and Being Julia.

Running with Scissors has touches of the surreal, the oddball, the queer, the satirical, the frustrating - it is like being lost in bonkers.

Where mother and son are lost is in the mad hatter’s kind of pink house of Dr Finch, Deidre’s psychiatrist - who qualifies as the most likely to be deregistered. The household is somewhat controlled by his haggard wife, Agnes. Dr Finch has a tendency towards incorporating or adopting clients into his household. He has two daughters, the standoffish and almost normal Natalie and the older, repressed disciple, Hope. The audience also spends a lot of time incorporated into this mad household.

What makes the stay so persuasive, even while we feel alienated from what is going on, are the performances. Brian Cox can turn his hand to most roles. He really makes us believe that such a character as Dr Finch could exist. Jill Clayburgh, in a rare screen role, opts out of glamour as Agnes. Evan Rachel Wood is the frequently deadpan Natalie. The surprise is that the supporting role of Hope is well played by Gwyneth Paltrow.

The cast is really very strong, especially with the addition of Joseph Fiennes as another adoptee, a gay schizophrenic who has a relationship with the young Augusten and who is the character who gets the opportunity almost to run with scissors, literally.

The screenplay is an accumulation of memories rather than plot-driven, so one could opt in and out much as Deirdre does and as Augusten does. The effect of the film depends on whether you get caught up with Deirdre or with Augusten - and Joseph Cross tries his best to be independent of them all while really dependent. But he survived to remember and invent this tale from the madhouse.

Peter Malone