If Little Miss Sunshine put the fun back into dysfunctional, as one tagline would have it, the film version of Augusten Burroughs's memoir, Running With Scissors, restores dysfunctionality's funk.
Director Ryan Murphy effectively stuffs us down the rabbit hole of a semi-intellectual and quasi-criminal out-of-control 1970s suburban counterculture, but, despite generally sufficient acting, the story and characterizations are too sketchy to carry the emotional oomph that they should.
Augusten (Joseph Cross) is the son of an alcoholic father, Norman (Alec Baldwin), and a narcissistic, hysterical, and occasionally psychotic poet mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), who chronically and nonchalantly allows him to skip school. Deirdre comes under the influence of a nefarious psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), who overdrugs and, it's hinted, takes sexual advantage of her, while encouraging her to drive away her husband. Finch takes control of both her finances and her son. Thus Augusten becomes stranded in the Finches' castle of chaos, a horribly unkempt mansion at constant risk of IRS confiscation. Augusten's unwholesome companions there include not just the eccentrically lordly Finch himself, but his almost catatonically depressed wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), his God- and father-worshipping older daughter Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his younger daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood), whose idea of entertaining a young visitor is to strap him into gear for electric shock therapy.
Augusten stays loosely in his cherished mother's orbit, even as she essentially disowns him and takes on lesbian lovers. And though his early interactions with Natalie prickle with a sexual charge, he determines that he's gay and gets involved with another pseudo-son of Dr. Finch's, the truly disturbed though intermittently tender Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes). As his mother spirals more clinically out of control, and Finch proves an ever-more-reckless father substitute, Augusten realizes that to survive, much less to realize his dreams of becoming a cosmetologist and maybe a writer, he has to escape.
Benning's getting a lot of ink for her performance here, but it's spotty. Her craziness is convincing, in a methody way, but her ball-busting wife and lit-bitch poetry-group scenes are a little over the top. Cox approaches his work gamely enough, but the role of Finch is badly written. We don't get to know enough about him to understand the power he has over people. Nor do we quite get what makes him tick. While money's apparently a factor (we learn that he's a skilled extortionist as well as a quack), and while the pills seem to flow freely, it's not clear that Finch himself ever takes those pills or whether this kind of seedy greed supersedes or merely enables what he thinks of as his work. Authority might be his intoxicant, but even that doesn't quite square since he uses that authority in such a haphazard manner. A scene in which he attributes divine significance to the form of his latest turd suggests some real (religious) psychosis, shared by Hope, but that's not explored to any satisfying and believable degree either.
I was more impressed by Fiennes, whose sad, wild eyes understatedly convey his struggle to control his violence and hallucinations; by Clayburgh, who gives us quick glimpses of the once hopeful, now psychically battered woman within the unwashed shell of a wife and mother; and by Baldwin, whose quiet tension bespeaks the proverbial wits' end.
Joseph Cross is sweetly appealing as Augusten, particularly in his scenes with Natalie and Agnes. But the character remains something of a cipher and a nest of contradictions. A momma's boy whose momma is an indisputable nightmare, he's intellectually curious but unschooled, street-smart but seemingly unaware of the dangers Neil poses for him, calculating but also prey to the swamp of eccentrics and sinister intentions surrounding him. He warns us at the beginning of the film that it doesn't matter where he starts his story because no one will believe it anyway. But we do believe it—we just don't quite get it. How can he be so worldly and clueless at the same time?
One answer might be because he's a child overwhelmed by several forms of awful excess during a head-spinning decade. Filling in a hundred blanks ourselves, perhaps with reference to the source memoir, that might be a conclusion we could firm up. And it's the explanation implied in Murphy's direction, which symbolizes that excess and bewilderment by slow-mo montages set to spaced-out '70s top-40 songs. Those convey a sort of passive, anything-goes mood, but they're no substitute for characterization, and without characterization the film narrative, on its own terms, doesn't cohere.
-A.C.K.
PHOTO: Cross and Annette Bening as Augusten and Deirdre
