Running With Scissors – in this hard to believe true story based on the memoirs of Augusten Burroughs, a young boy (played by Joseph Cross) is raised in a completely psychotic household, circa 1975, with his mother, Deidre (Annette Benning) and his father (Alec Baldwin) who divorces her, when Augusten is just growing into puberty. This is Benning’s movie – an Oscar worthy performance of a deranged, drug-infested want-to-be- poet who puts her “rage on the page” in hopes of future book sales, instead of enjoying life with her son Augusten, in the present. She spends her time sipping martinis while carrying on about creativity, passion and hysteria as she pours her sorrows to quirky Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) who gives her all the wrong advice for all the wrong reasons. Finch’s family finally adopts Burrough’s character into his equally deranged household with mother, Mrs. Finch (Jill Clayburgh) and daughters Natalie and Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow and Evan Rachel Wood.) The lines are intelligent, the characters well-performed and the mood is right-on reflective of the era of which it is based, but the movie still doesn’t gel. But Burrough’s does, and the audience who loved his book(s) in which he pours out his repressed anger, will be amazed that he actually turned out…normal? Whatever that is. The book is light and rich, the movie dark and anemic. Read the book. Burrough’s is brilliant and his deep passages are something Hollywood can’t capture on film. Two tiaras.
