Movie Review: Running With Scissors

by Chad Jones

One of the toughest things to do in the world of movies, besides taking Jessica Alba seriously, is transforming an acclaimed novel into an acclaimed film.  Sometimes, great films turn out to be based on lesser-known books whose existence is relatively unknown, possibly mentioned in a little blurb at the bottom of a Wikipedia entry.  And other times, insightful and moving stories somehow get lost in the transition between the paperback and the film stock.

Running With Scissors

This is a son's story of a bipolar-poet mother with delusions of grandeur who falls into the care of an unorthodox psychiatrist.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Running With Scissors

Running with Scissors, a memoir turned motion picture, struggles with this problem.  Based on the tragic yet true events of author Augusten Burroughs’ teen years—including his parents’ tumultuous divorce and his mothers severe mental decay—the book is a casual and intricate look into the life of a child who was forced to raise himself.

While director Ryan Murphy (creator of the hit series Nip/Tuck) tries to balance the mix of insanity and humor that made Burroughs’ memoir a New York Times bestseller, there’s something in the film that just isn’t right.

Is the cast to blame?  Hardly. Up-and-coming actor Joseph Cross, who plays Augusten, is the right amount of vulnerable and righteous, even if he comes off as a little inactive at times.  Annette Bening, who plays Augusten’s psychotic poet mother Deidre Burroughs, taps into and nearly out-performs her Academy Award-nominated ‘desperate housewife’-ish character from American Beauty. Brian Cox fits well in his role as Dr. Finch, Deidre’s psychiatrist and Augusten’s foster parent, and he brings out the passionate ridiculousness that is essential to the role.  And rounding out the cast are Gwyneth Paltrow and Evan Rachel Wood and as Hope and Natalie, Dr. Finch’s wacky and witty daughters, and Joseph Fiennes as Neil Bookman, the middle-aged schizophrenic lover of the fourteen-year-old Augusten.

Is the script to blame?  Well, not really.  A great deal of the dead-pan dialogue and keen narration from the memoir is transplanted word-for-word onto the screen.  The pace of the film also follows the pace of the book:  slow and awkward at first, then frenzied, then slow again.  

What really seems amiss is that Scissors teeters around the same pitfall that Ron Howard’s Da Vinci Code fell into earlier this year.  Basically, the more notoriety a book gets, the less likely its respective film can ever match up.  Literature as enthralling and as praised as Scissors and Code, etc. has trouble bridging the gap because, even before the film process has even begun, the audience (assuming they’ve read the work) has built up their own personal, pre-conceived portrait of the story world that rarely matches what they see before them—no matter how ‘good’ it is.

Obviously, great books have been made into great movies before.  It’s a rarer phenomenon, though it definitely happens.  But this scenario seems to be the only explanation for why Running with Scissors, an amazing book in my opinion, turns out to be a little less amazing in film form.

While I enjoyed the flick and would recommend it to all, I enjoyed it less than my girlfriend who hadn’t read the book.  At first I figured having a background with the characters would give me the upper hand, and I thought that her unfamiliarity with the story would cause her to miss out on details that would make the movie more meaningful.  In reality, despite being entertained, I spent less time enjoying the film and more time noticing its deviations from the novel (won’t spoil them, though).  I don’t know. See for yourself.