Running With Scissors

Grade: D-

How screenwriter/director Ryan Murphy was permitted to turn Augusten Burroughs’ delightfully wacky, subversive, laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly haunting memoir into such a dire, dreary, overwrought, disjointed disappointment is anyone’s guess, but James Frey is getting the last laugh that his book deal with Warner Brothers was so unceremoniously cancelled.

A gay son dealing with an absent father who escapes a prescription drug addicted wife who subsequently turns her son into a second husband is truly (I have mountains of self-help books and cashed therapy checks to prove it) the story of my life, but not a moment of this forced, heightened, tiresome and very unfunny melodrama rings true. In episodically tedious and lifeless fashion, Annette Bening is either 1) drug-induced, speech slurring comatose; 2) ranting like a shrilly bombastic lunatic; or 3) literally dripping with tears as Augusten’s mentally ill, pathologically needy and unsympathetically harsh and judgmental mother. It’s an emotionally packed performance to be sure, but one that belongs in another movie entirely – a better one. Brian Cox is a non-entity in the role of an unethical loony-tune psychiatrist who prescribes medication like candy and needs more help than he could possibly dole out to others, Jill Clayburgh dowdy and little else as his long suffering wife, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes make one question if they have any acting ability whatsoever as one of the psychiatrist’s freakishly screechy daughters and her schizophrenic, pedophile, adopted brother – one is embarrassed by and for them simultaneously. Joseph Cross brings a modicum of dignity to the author’s flat alter-ego, but only Alec Baldwin manages to rise above the vacuous and unpleasant material as a man forced to choose between his child and his own sanity.

Unlike the inspirationally irreverent book, which managed to tell a story of survival against the backdrop of almost unimaginable lunacy and darkness, the film misfires virtually every tragically comic and hysterically dramatic moment. The book is an embarrassment of demented riches – people snacking on dog kibble, electric shock experimentation, masturbation rooms, kitty executions and excrement analysis to name but a few. But when presented in such an unimaginatively straight and somber manner, it all feels so unbelievable and manufactured one can’t help but question how much of Burroughs’ story is the stuff of teenage fantasy and exaggeration, the ultimate disservice to an author whose work has always rung so absurdistly true.

In one of the film’s more telling moments, virtually every character is shown simultaneously screaming in torment. Would that they had allowed such behavior in a movie theater.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0439289/