Running with Scissors (2007, Blu-ray Disc)

REAL LIFE:

Alec Baldwin gets busted by the revelation
that he had a meltdown against his daughter
because she refused to take his phone call.

THIS FILM:

Alec Baldwin gets a collect call from his
teen-aged son and instead of taking it,
he refuses to accept the charges.


They should stop telling writers to "Write what you know." Almost every time a writer takes the adage literally, we end up with a movie nobody wants to watch. Off the tip of my tongue, I can think of a slew of films - including Riding in Cars with Boys and White Oleander - that went wrong PRECISELY because the writer thought we'd want to watch two hours of scenes from his or her life. It's a writer's conceit to think anybody cares about the writer's journey, especially when the writer has little, if any, visibility for anything other than writing down a writer's personal memoir.

Running with Scissors tells the story of Augusten Burroughs whose dysfunctional childhood became the basis for a personal memoir of the same name. If this were a biopic of Hitchcock, Hemingway, Orson Welles - or anybody we'd heard of first - we might have reason to care about how Writer X got here. But we don't. Augusten Burroughs' claim to fame was to write a book titled, Running with Scissors: A Memoir. That's it. In other words, the movie is the story of how Burroughs got to be a writer - by writing this story.

That puts a lot of stress on the entertainment factor of Burroughs' story. How compelling is it? Well, Burroughs (Joseph Cross) has a close relationship with his mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening) who has a need to be acknowledged through literary success. In fact, her need is so pronounced, it borders on psychosis - that is, until it crashes right through. All of this is a bit much for Burroughs' father, Norman (Alec Baldwin), whose lack of enthusiasm for Deirdre's dreams becomes a daily solicitation for her abuse - and by now, she's really, really good at it.

This leads the unhappy couple to marriage therapy, but through a most unusual therapist. Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) believes in letting people express themselves. He believes in removing all restraints and letting people find their own space. This is like catnip for Deirdre, who leaves Norman and, ultimately, drops Burroughs off with the Finches, to care for him while she goes in search of herself. This is obviously traumatic for Burroughs, especially since he has spent so much of his life ditching school to be with his mother.

The Finches, in turn, are more like The Addams Family than Ozzie and Harriet. Dr. Finch's wife, Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), looks to be about 100 - in part because she knows what a svengali her husband can be. She knows, at the very sight of Deirdre, that her husband's interest in her will be more than strictly professional. In the meantime, the Finch daughters - Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood) and Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow) - are a warring brood. Natalie is the angry rebel while Hope is the fastidious and high-strung co-dependent whom her father openly declares to be his favorite. When Burroughs first meets Natalie, the girl is trying to seduce him - not into the sack but into putting on a working electro-shock headset - and the boy is almost ready to take the shock!

But things are ever complicated under the Finch roof. Adoptee, Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes), admits to Burroughs that he's gay, only to discover, by Burroughs' counter-admission that he, too, is gay. Both men are trying to make sense of a world where anything goes, where there are no rules but where the result is anything but hippie innocence. Later, when Bookman discovers that one particular bit of generosity - Dr. Finch's payment of his tuition at an art academy - was, in fact, simply a machination to get Bookman out of the way so Dr. Finch could "operate" with fewer witnesses or distractions, is absolutely devastating.

Burroughs' impossible childhood - where he found himself chasing a mother who was chasing her own needs - is not unlike my own. Then again, it's not unlike a lot of people's childhoods. There's an added pull - the historical context of the 70s, with post-sixties middle-agers trying to create their own utopian experiments out of suburban living - but much of this film involves little more than miserable, angst-driven characters harping at each other with histrionics on overdrive. Writer-director, Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck) does a decent job of shooting this mess, and there are certainly some great lines amidst some great performances. You either love this film or hate it, and I'm sure some folks are rhapsodic about their trip to Maudlinland.

Dramedies tend to find their heart at the intersection between horrific angst and dark comedy, sort of like American Beauty or Magnolia. For every one of these that works*, there are a hundred Moonlight Miles. The emotional dynamic (mommy issues) reminded me of Igby Goes Down but the expectation gap between the emotions squirted all over the screen and my own yawning boredom reminded me more of Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown (whereas Almost Famous was so good, it hurt).

Maybe I'm just being too hard on the film, but for my money, this is just a very maudlin soap opera, one I couldn't begin to enjoy. In the end, it suggests that writers should stop "writing" what they know and start "using" what they know. The moment a film becomes super-glued to real life, that's the moment dramatic structure becomes a hostage to the accuracy of a tale nobody may end up caring about. It almost makes me want to write a B-movie film titled, "Mommy Never Liked Me," or alternately titled, "Mommy Was A Hippy Lune."**

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* Actually, the jury is still out on Magnolia, but I loved it. It's one of my all-time favorite films.

** In making that statement, I'm not judging Burroughs' life. My own "mommy tale" is no less weird. My disappointment is with this film, which meandered aimelessly and left little more than histrionics to glue itself together.