It
almost invariably turns out badly when one of your favorite books gets turned
into a movie. For example one of my favorite books of all time The Shipping News
got the full treatment, Kevin Spacey, Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore and it was
the most dreadful experiences I've ever had in a theater. Then there's Cold Mountain,
a much beloved book that I never got around to reading and a movie that I very
much enjoyed. And then there's the happy instances such as To Kill a Mockingbird
where great literature is turned into even greater cinema. Unfortunately Running
With Scissors falls into the Shipping News category. I loved the book and nearly
fell asleep in the film.
Ryan
Murphy whose professional career has revolved largely around Nip/Tuck, writes
and directs from the hilarious autobiographical novel by Augusten Burroghs. Murphy's
script is mostly a collection of snapshot vignettes from Burroughs bizarre childhood,
that fails terribly to establish any kind of linear narrative. Where the book
succeeds is in the hilarious manner in which Burroughs prose describes the bizarre
people that populate his world, and the crazy things that occur. The film merely
shows these events, but fails to thread the story together through narrative or
subtext.
We pick
up the story with Augusten as a young boy enamored of his bi-polar, eccentric
mother whom he often skips school to remain home with. Burroughs is played by
Joseph Cross whom, like all of the actors, does a good job of inhabiting his role,
but is unable to transcend the limitations of the script. Annette Bening is perfect
as his psychologically unbalanced mother who fancies herself as a brilliant poet.
Her delusions of grandeur and dark mood swings have turned her husband (Alec Baldwin)
into an emasculated alcoholic and an ineffective father. Things take a true turn
for the bizarre when she turns to an eccentric shrink (Brian Cox) and becomes
involved with his peculiar family.
Cox
eventually suggests that Augusten move in with his family, while his mother gets
her personal thing together. The family is a collection of truly strange individuals
who give dysfunctional an all new dimension. Gwyneth Paltrow is wasted as the
doting oldest daughter of her father, and Evan Rachel Woods is well cast as the
twisted and candid youngest daughter Natalie. The film is amazingly well cast,
but the film is nothing more than an empty travelogue of Augusten's long, strange
trip. The book is terrifically effective at making the most twisted and repulsive
things seem perfectly normal, whereas the film merely shows you these twisted
and atrocious things in order to shock, but nowhere in the narrative does the
book's tremendous heart raise to the surface. As a result the film fails to convey
the underlying humanity that the similarly themed American Beauty gets across
in such an affecting manner.
The
book shines a unique light on the issues of homosexuality, mental illness, drug
abuse, and love relationships, unfortunately Murphy's attempt to capture this
light, falters right out of the gate.
