Nick-Davis.com: Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors
First screened in October 2006 / Reviewed in August 2024

Director: Ryan Murphy. Cast: Joseph Cross, Annette Bening, Evan Rachel Wood, Brian Cox, Jill Clayburgh, Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Alec Baldwin, Jack Kaeding, Kristin Chenoweth, Gabrielle Union, Colleen Camp, Dagmara Domińczyk, Patrick Wilson. Screenplay: Ryan Murphy (based on the memoir by Augusten Burroughs).

We all know the right viewing circumstances can bias you toward a movie. I saw Running with Scissors when I hosted a pre-release screening and Q&A with lead actor Joseph Cross—my first of these kinds of gigs I scored after moving to Chicago and in many ways starting my professional life. I'd mostly liked the book. Cross was lovely and totally unjaded, even while riding high on this huge role in an attention-getting movie with a high-caliber cast.

We all know the right individual element, especially if it's a performance, can bias you toward a movie. Annette Bening is tremendous in this, perfectly prepped to tear into every outlandish trait and every human-sized facet of Deirdre Burroughs, which have to span broad comedy and deep-valley tragedy, and which must add up into a convincing person but also must not add up, because Deirdre doesn't really do that. She has to telegraph pretty precise levels of how drugged she is in many of her scenes (including the drug of self-delusion) and also how much masking she's doing (of the drugs' effects, but not just those), and also how genuine and not drug-based some of her biggest delusional are. She has to retain a hold on the audience even after she disappears for a while and even after she makes hideous choices, but she also has to alienate the audience enough for the final beats to work, without drowning them in too muchway pathos). She has to telegraph depths of abuse that the screenplay softens or omits to such a degree that you wouldn't guess they happened, and even Burroughs's memoir doesn't adequately admit and explore. She has to star in a desperately sad story that does have some laughs, even though the version of Running with Scissors being made and marketed around her is a comedy with some sad parts. She has to cling with every fingernail to an honest and complex performance, working for a prolific and well-intentioned director who often considers casting 90% of the job, who idolizes actresses without always taking care to direct them, and who isn't all that into layering his scenes, from the writing stage through the final cut. But she also can't look like she's having to work around her director and in fact needs to fit in as closely as possible to his less modulated and mature take on the material. I still think very highly of Bening in this performance, right up to the landing she sticks in her final scene, made indelible by the gravity of its feelings and by her appropriately odd gesture of wiping the same tear from one side of her face a half-dozen times, in one-second spurts, while the other half of her face just sits there, stolidly defeated by life. Again.

I wish Running with Scissors were better. Its look is totally undistinguished, though some of the gaudiness may be intentional. The song cues are robustly literal, as are many of the makeup and hairstyling choices. In terms of shots, rhythm, and tenor, Murphy's direction has elements of not-quite-top-tier 30s and 40s movies where you basically just cut amongst closeups of actors; he mixes that with a kind of mid-grade anime approach, giving each character some visual trademarks and broad tones to play, hoping they have enough personality individually and collectively to pass as entertainment, even if the plot feels over-stuffed and the world-building less than persuasive. Cross gives a good-sport performance and seems to feel things as Augusten, or about Augusten, on which Murphy isn't fully capitalizing. He's also a little green, though, to furnish the kind of depth that Bening is smuggling beneath the movie's thinnish approach to character and storytelling, and he doesn't feel gay almost at all. Brian Cox is atypically cartoonish, Jill Clayburgh gets pushed for an in-film Best Supporting Actress campaign that was never ever gonna take off, and actors as different as Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, Alec Baldwin and Joseph Fiennes show us the colors they often exhibit when they're less than maximally inspired.

In short: very worth it for Bening, especially when you imagine the simpler performance that might have made Murphy completely happy and even drummed up a bigger viewership who just wanted a kooky diorama of a strange, unsettling childhood. She has the integrity and resourcefulness to go way deeper than that. Your call if that's enough of a lure to make you stream a movie that you likely skipped when it was new, and that puts so many other feet wrong. Grade: C+

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Golden Globe Nominations:
	Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Annette Bening

Other Awards:
	Boston Society of Film Critics: Best Supporting Actor: Alec Baldwin (also for The Departed and The Good Shepherd)

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