“I guess it doesn’t matter where I begin,” reasons the adult narrator of Running With Scissors, the inevitable Oscar contender adapted from Augusten Burroughs’s wacky memoir of coming out as a gay teen in his adoptive guru’s carnivalesque commune. “No one is gonna believe me anyway.”
No one? In fact, Burroughs’s public has bought his story in a big way: The book has earned awestruck reviews and moved roughly a million copies. The movie, which Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy has shaped into an enjoyably overwrought ode to the kid’s miraculous survival of everything from parental abandonment and pedophilia to bad ’70s fashion, proves a classic ‘Me’ decade maxim: That which doesn’t kill you makes absolutely fabulous material—provided your mother doesn’t use it first.
Like the stranger-than-fiction shocker that turned its author’s painful adolescence into gold, the Hollywood Scissors starts with the six-year-old Augusten precociously putting rollers in Mom’s hair, the two drama queens competing for close-ups. Annette Bening may well collect an Academy Award for her inspired turn as Deirdre, the neglectful mother who’s ditched by her son on his way to achieving poetic justice. But there’s no mistaking the true star of this show. Indeed, it ends with a winking cameo by the real Burroughs, 40 going on 17, literally shoving offscreen the young unknown who plays him in the movie.
Until that climactic “look, Ma” moment, Burroughs—played from age 13 to 16 by wide-eyed newcomer Joseph Cross—serves as the straight man, so to speak, in a comedy where the inmates are running the asylum. Bening reportedly prepared for the role of pill-popping Deirdre by calculating the precise sound of each pharmacological slur right down to the milligram. But even more impressive is her ability to dignify this well-off white woman with her imagined “oppression” and very real struggle to “claim her voice as a woman and an artist”—to humanize a character that in other hands would look like a vicious satire of ’70s new-age feminism. As Dr. Finch, the certifiable professional who diagnoses Bening’s blocked writer as having “constipation both literal and subconscious,” Brian Cox goes beyond the book’s cartoon Santa Claus and scares up something closer to Max von Sydow’s exorcist.
Deirdre, floundering in her marriage to alcoholic Norman (Alec Baldwin), dumps the kid in the good doctor’s mansion and the movie’s Best Supporting Hams get to work: Gwyneth Paltrow as the doctor’s daughter Hope, dolled up like a Dutch milkmaid; Evan Rachel Wood as younger daughter Natalie, using an electroshock therapy machine to play doctor with Augusten; Jill Clayburgh as Mrs. Finch, staring blankly at Dark Shadows reruns and munching on doggy kibbles; and Joseph Fiennes as Bookman, the 33-year-old adopted son who takes young Augusten to bed. As Augusten, Cross has plenty to do just watching the other actors go nuts, which is fine because he’s playing the author in training, taking mental notes of all this insanity.
Working in the immodestly expressive, every-room-a-set-piece spirit of Wes Anderson, first-time director Murphy, armed with the best ’70s pop studio money can buy, renders the book’s boy-in-a-bubble claustrophobia capably—which has its disadvantages in terms of perspective. Staying indoors for most of the decade, the movie makes nothing of the irony that this adopted child of the freaky-deaky counterculture would find himself in the year of Ronald Reagan’s election. Still, tone is everything in a dark-comic farce, and Murphy pulls it off. Like the book, this deadpan celebration of neurosis makes a valiant effort to repress its comedy—which of course makes it funnier.