Running With Scissors (MA)
Directed by Ryan Murphy
The best films are those that draw from personal experiences and, as one of the characters in this film says, where would we be without our painful childhoods? When he was 14, Augusten Burroughs was given away to his mother’s shrink whose family was a commune of mega-dysfunctional people. Based on his actual personal memoirs, Augusten becomes somewhat of a hero when he finds himself having to cope with just about every excess of the 1970s ‘Me’ decade. It is really a drama of how a young gay man survived the nightmare of his childhood.
His alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) walks out on his unstable mother Diedre (Annette Bening) whose delusions of becoming a famous writer intensify after she starts popping pills.
Augusten (Joseph Cross) is suspicious of his mother’s shrink Dr Finch (Brian Cox) and his Brady-Bunch-gone-bad family. While his wife Agnes (Jill Claybough) munches on dog biscuits all day, youngest daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Ward) practices electroshock therapy on unsuspecting visitors. The elder ‘bible-dipping’ daughter Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow) evokes memories of The Royal Tenenbaums while the ‘adopted’ 35 year-old Neil (Joseph Fiennes) lives in the shed out the back.
The wacky narrative is carried along by 70s music as Nip/Tuck’s Ryan Murphy blends the comic and the macabre with the poignantly true. Augusten is a survivor who uses humour as a life raft. He says in the press notes, ‘When life is terrible or scary, you can sort of float on it until you reach higher ground.’ Although his introduction to sex, drugs and insanity left his boyhood innocence in smithereens, he had incredible resilience. This tragicomedy film uses a child’s vivid mix of curiosity, compassion and dismay to convey the story of a young man who loved life more than anything.
