Running With Scissors vs Girl, Interrupted

In a movie, if you need medicine, you cannot possibly survive on one filled prescription at a time. You must have several, so many in fact that they fill your entire medicine cabinet, and you don’t even have room for things like Band-aids or a tiny travel-sized bottle of mouthwash. Of course, in real life, the prescriptions are usually in the kitchen, and there’s usually just a couple at most. In movies though, the pill bottles have to number in the dozens, and they must be behind a mirror, so we can see exactly what that crazy character is using to mask her true self: PILLS. Sweet November, Garden State, and now Running With Scissors slaps us across the face with this revelation: Oh my God, she has so many pills.

In Running With Scissors, Annette Bening plays Deirdre Burroughs, a melodramatic poet who would love to be world famous, and seems to manufacture rage in hopes of channeling it into some form of writing inspiration. Her biggest fan is her son, Augusten, who brushes her hair and sits, rapt, listening to her endless poems. Deirdre is a mess; it’s barely conceivable that she was once patient or pleasant or fun. Instead she bounds from one emotion to the next, always ready to assign blame to the system or capital-M-Men, or her alcoholic husband (Alec Baldwin). Deirdre is obviously manic-depressive, but also probably schizophrenic, and she so desperately needs medical attention it’s hard to begrudge her at first when she visits Dr. Finch (Brian Cox.). And so he loads her up on pills, and counsels her marriage, and even lets young Augusten come for visits in his home. Everything’s going to be just fine.

Except not. Dr. Finch is comically bad at counseling, and his home is such a sty you can practically smell it from the screen. His wife (Jill Clayburgh) is near-catatonic, watching Dark Shadows and snacking on dog food (she must really like it. They don’t even have a dog); his daughter Hope is a naïf who starves her cat because it told her to; younger daughter Natalie is just a regular teen, and thus probably the craziest of all. And then there’s Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes—where’s that guy been?), who is artistic and sensitive, yet prone to violent outbreaks caused by the voices in his head. He befriends young Augusten, and starts a sexual relationship, despite being a couple decades his senior. Just when we’re thinking that Augusten’s life must surely get more wacky as opposed to more scary, his mother does the unthinkable: she turns Augusten over to Dr. Finch. For good. To raise as his son.

Running With Scissors is, as you probably know, a true story, and is based on a book that I…wait for it…actually read. Man, I wish I could say that more often. In the book, Burroughs remembers lamenting that his life weren’t more normal and sitcom-prepackaged. This is a problem for the movie, because so much of it seems sitcom-prepackaged and, from that point-of-view, normal. The sets and costumes go a little overboard to show us this is the 1970s (Deirdre can’t just wear a bright yellow tunic. She has to wear a bright yellow tunic that matches her turban perfectly, as well as the lamp, the rug, the curtains and the sofa.) And the Finch’s home, which is filthy and creepy, is filthy and creepy in a way that is awfully close to mysterious, spooky and altogether ooky. At times, I truly feared for Augusten, which was hard, given that so much of his life seems edited for laugh-track breaks. Throw in the most disruptive retro songs soundtrack in recent memory, and Running With Scissors threatens to turn into parody. First-time director Ryan Murphy definitely holds the characters in high regard and sympathy (otherwise, Deirdre would be the Mommy Dearest harridan I feared when I first heard they were making the movie).

What holds everything together—besides the great source material, which even Running With Scissors’ sometimes overzealous editor can’t derail—is a solid group of performances from everyone involved. As infuriating as Deirdre can be, it’s impossible not to recognize what an interesting, funny job Annettte Bening has done with the role. Oscars have been given for far less effort. Alec Baldwin is also good, because Alec Baldwin decided a couple years ago that he was going to let his gut grow and never give a boring performance again. As Hope and Natalie, respectively, Gwyneth Paltrow and Evan Rachel Wood find the sadness and desperation in every line that might otherwise be played as jokes. They’ve got offbeat, dark roles, and make the most of their too-limited time onscreen. Somewhere, Christina Ricci’s agent is in serious trouble.

The movie, rightfully so, belongs to Joseph Cross, as the teenaged Augusten. Cross gives an understated, natural performance, and is heartbreaking in his longing for a life that is at once glamorous and mundane. In his hands, there’s no danger Augusten will ever turn into a sitcom cliché. As the real Augusten would probably tell you: that’s both good and bad news.

Running With Scissors is ultimately a satisfying movie (stay through the credits and try not to well up at that last image, especially if you’ve read the book.) But, it’s so episodic, with each scene representing not just another moment in Augusten’s life, but another event, that its true appeal will probably be in a couple years, on cable, when you find it randomly, an hour or so into the film, and watch anyway. Aside from the obvious themes of lost youth, suicide, mental health and retro hairstyles, this is probably the characteristic that most ties Running With Scissors to Girl, Interrupted.

Yeah, I know, you already saw it, and you aren’t going to watch it again. But what if you were just surfing around, and it was the scene of the girls downstairs bowling on that tiny old wooden lane, with Aretha on the soundtrack? You’d watch. Or what if Daisy wasn’t coming out of her room, and you knew they were gonna find her hanging there in the bathroom while It’s the End of the World plays over and over? Girl, Interrupted represents its era a little more cautiously than Running With Scissors. The soundtrack isn’t necessarily the big hits of that time, but distinctly that of lost females (Downtown and Angel of the Morning are creepier and sadder than they were ever intended, by simple virtue of accompanying the interrupted girls of the movie). The same goes for the costuming and sets, which just sort of look plain and odd, rather than period. The performances are mostly good; you may just remember Angelina Jolie as the strutting, id-indulging sociopath of the lot (as is often the case in movies, she’s the craziest, so she makes the most sense). Of the Other Girls (as in “Winona, Angelina, and the other girls”), Brittany Murphy makes the biggest impact, but the star of the show, for better or worse, is Winona Ryder.

As Susanna, Ryder basically has the Augusten Burroughs role. She’s sexually curious, journaling to try and figure out her pain, and surrounded by lunatics that she trumps by remaining self-aware. And like Joseph Cross, Ryder spends most of her movie doing subtle, internal work, allowing her louder costars to orbit around her. As a result, she didn’t get much credit for any of the good in Girl, Interrupted. I won’t ask you to sit beginning-to-end, but if you happen to catch that scene of her strumming guitar and trying to sing Downtown to comfort one of her troubled friends, you might find yourself giving her some overdue props. Hell, you just might find yourself finishing the movie.

Running With Scissors: B-
Girl, Interrupted: B