I must admit to being overly apprehensive about this adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir. The biggest literary genre of the past decade, Confessions Of A Teenage Abuse Victim, may keep the reader’s inner car crash hunter turning the pages, but such subject matter can be simply unbearable when played out on an elephant-sized screen.
Happily, this is not the case with Running With Scissors, a film that turns out to be much closer to last years The Squid And The Whale than The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. Like Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical offering, Burroughs finds warmth and wit in his survivor’s tale. Born to an uninterested alcoholic (Baldwin) and the world’s most narcissistic mother (Bening, whose penchant for over-acting is ideally suited to the role), Scissors charts the extraordinary set of circumstances by which the author (Cross) was placed in the care of his mother’s even crazier psychiatrist (Cox). In his unlikely new home he finds an atrocity exhibit of neuroses, paedophilia, dirty dishes and, bizarrely, a family of sorts. Joseph Fiennes is the schizophrenic in the backyard who becomes his lover. Evan Rachel Wood is personable punkette with a dark past. Jill Clayburgh is the poignantly downtrodden wife. Gwyneth Paltrow, meanwhile, successfully reprises her role from The Royal Tenenbaums.
Well performed, funny and undeniably affecting, Running With Scissors sadly peters out as it goes on, but has plenty to recommend it.