Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors **

Stupid, silly, melodramatic, and painfully unfunny for every single second along the way, "Running with Scissors" is nothing more than a few decent performances, alongside with a horrible script, and one dimensional characters. Every single character in this film is highlighted by some kind of quirk, and instead of using that quirk to develop the character and define who they are, the quirk is simply used as a quirk. This is the Lifetime TV version of "The Royal Tenenbaums." And there are parts of it that have their laughs, where you don't really mind the horrible excuse for a script, but on the whole it's forgettable, and after its over you realize that you've frowned more than you've laughed, and you've cringed at how awful it is more than you've smiled at how genius it is.

"Running with Scissors" is supposed to be a true story, and the memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, but I'm that some of it has to be a work of fiction. It begins with young Augusten, who is obviously influenced by his mother, Deirdre(Annette Benning), a would be actress who lets him stay home from school often so that she could practice her poetry in front of him. He doesn't get anything from his father, Norman, a holic of the drink and work played by Alec Baldwin. With his parents fighting all the time, Augusten has to live with the notion that they might be getting a divorce, something that is obviously on both of their minds when they go to visit Dr. Finch. Finch is a shrink who doesn't really have any worthy methods up his sleeve to cure people, except to give them as many pills as possible, even those that he doesn't know of. Finch sees the type of situation that Augusten is in at home, and offers Deirdre to house and take care of Augusten during this time. Deirdre hands her son over to the Finches, which turns out to be a much worse idea than it should have been. The Finches are completely crazy, especially with Finch at the helm. His wife, Agnes, doesn't do much but sit on the couch eating dog food. He has two daughters, Hope and Natalie, and Hope is "by far his favorite daughter," something that he does not care about saying in front of his other daughter. Augusten begins to sort through his own life, deciding that he's gay, and beginning an affair with the much older Neil Bookman, another resident of the Finch household. Seeing how screwed up the Finches are, and how damaged he could become by staying there, Augusten wants to return back to his mother. Sadly, Finch has gotten the worse of her as well, as she becomes addicted to his pills, and begins to experiment with other women, all while grateful to not be burdened with the ideas of motherhood.

"Running with Scissors" has brief moments of perfectly acceptable dark comedy, but then it shifts towards drama and this is where it finds it faults. The tone shifts quicker than a rat running down the street, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it. At times it tried to be a dark comedy, and then with the snap of a finger it turns into something that is trying to be more deep and poignant. But it fails at both attempts. These drama scenes are far too melodramatic, and the characters are so unrealistic to the point where I just couldn't care about anything that happened to anyone. All the drama was even accompanied by some of the most unoriginal and dull music I have ever heard. I can give it credit for the performances, though. Brian Cox, especially, as Finch is hilarious, delivering every single line with the perfect amount of deadpan needed. He's the center of everything wacky here, and yet he appears to not let anything bother him at all. One of the funniest scenes here is when he shows Augusten and his mother his masturbatorium, which is in a room off the side of his office. And yes, that is one of the only things, verbatim, that I remember from the entire film. Benning is decent here, and Baldwin steals his small scenes from everyone else, but that's about it. Joseph Fiennes does his role too over the top, and young Joseph Cross as our hero is nothing special. I can't see him going anywhere big anytime soon, and he still has to prove himself. This plays too much like a carbon copy of Wes Anderson of P.T. Anderson, and not even something close to a good one. I don't really know how much of what is in this film actually happened, but if I were Augusten Burroughs I would be angry that my life was turned into a bad version of "The Royal Tenenbaums." Hell, I would wish my life was more like that. . .