Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
The coming-of-age tragicomedy, "Running With Scissors," wants to be this year's "American Beauty" -- that is, a savage satire of American culture seen through the eyes of one dysfunctional family by a new director with a lot of stars in off-beat roles aiming at Oscar nominations.
Only this time the object of scorn is not Republican capitalism but its opposite, the counterculture of the '70s, and the director getting his big shot -- Ryan Murphy -- is at a loss to make anything very biting, interesting or funny out of his attack.
Based on the personal memoirs of Augusten Burroughs (Joseph Cross), it tells the depressing story of the author's upbringing in the '70s as the only child of a masochistic, alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) and a bipolar, failed-poet mother (Annette Bening).
When Augusten is 14, his parents break up and his mom takes him to live in the de facto commune of her shrink (Brian Cox), a complete lunatic who looks for cosmic signs in the shape of his bowel movements and embodies the excess of every wacko guru of the Me Decade.
In the course of the movie, the young hero is able to embrace his homosexuality, but comes to see himself as the victim of the women's movement and every other liberation faction of the Vietnam era, and yearns for the order and structure of the coming Reagan Revolution.
Bening is very strong as the Woodstock Joan Crawford, and so are some of the other performers. But their characters are so shallow or crazed -- the movie gives them no dignity -- that they just don't seem worth anyone's time or interest.
The movie also suffers from Cross' lack of movie-star charisma. The 20-year-old actor can't even begin to pass for a boy of 14, and he conveys little of the narrative wit and charm that held Burroughs' bleak memoir together and made it a good read.
Murphy (TV's "Nip/Tuck") nails a scene here and there, but fails to make this tale of epic abuse either instructive or meaningful, and his evocation of a period he's too young to remember rings false at every turn.
In the end, there's also something distinctly distasteful about a movie in which the central figure casts himself as noble martyr while character-assassinating his parents. One leaves the theater suspecting there just may be a whole other side to this story.
To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.
© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All Rights Reserved.
