Running with Scissors
Grade: B

Fasten your seatbelts ladies! This year’s race for the Best Actress Oscar is going to be a tight one.
The buzz has it that Helen Mirren reigns supreme in The Queen, Penélope Cruz sizzles in Volver and Cate Blanchett rocks The Good German. Now Annette Bening enters the ring with her brilliant turn as a mentally ill mother in the long-awaited film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running with Scissors.
As Deirdre, Burroughs’ mom, Bening undergoes radical and completely convincing mood shifts, crackling with grandiose manic glee in some scenes and slumping into blank-eyed catatonic depressions in others. And though the memoir is perhaps best known for the gay relationship between a teenage Burroughs and a man twenty years his senior, writer and director Ryan Murphy gives ample attention to the lesbian relationships Deirdre conducts after she divorces her slimeball alcoholic husband (Alec Baldwin).
Bening’s performance is undoubtedly the highlight of the film, which is entertaining and generally faithful to the book. But the script is hampered by an inconsistent tone that clumsily transitions from zany humor to pathos, and the upbeat ending feels trite after we’ve spent two hours coming to terms with the inevitability of emotional suffering.
For the handful of you who are not familiar with the memoir, Running with Scissors documents Burroughs’ relationship with his unstable mom, and her unilateral decision send him off to live with a highly unorthodox psychiatrist (Brian Cox), his dog food eating wife (Jill Clayburgh), his daughters (Gwyneth Paltrow and Evan Rachel Wood), and an adopted schizophrenic son (Joseph Fiennes) who practices statutory rape on Burroughs.

The “way too weird to be true” flavor of the story raises questions as to whether Burroughs pulled a James Frey and elaborated on some of his material. In fact, the Massachusetts family on which he based these characters claims he’s full of crap, and in 2005 they slapped a defamation of character lawsuit on him.
Twenty-year-old actor Joseph Cross looks boyish enough to portray Burroughs in his early teens. In early scenes his delivery is wooden, but by the film’s end he effectively conveys the rage and confusion that anyone in his shoes would feel.