Think your family's messed up?
Try a psychiatrist who sees signs from God in his bowel movements, a mother with a penchant for snacking on dog kibble, one daughter who converses with cats, another with the mouth of a sailor and a schizophrenic adopted son.
Unfortunately for Augusten Burroughs (Joseph Cross), this is the real-life dysfunctional family he is thrust into when his parents divorce and his mother (Annette Bening) has a psychotic breakdown. For some reason, she thinks her meltdown is good grounds for giving her son to her therapist, adeptly portrayed by Brian Cox.
Directed by Ryan Murphy and based onBurroughs' personal memoir of the same name, Running with Scissors presents a bizarre albeit unbalanced blend of drama and comedy.
The entire cast gives good performances, but Cox steals the show with his dead-on delivery as the psychiatrist, whose eccentricity provides the majority of the humor in this predominantly serious film. After all, it's hard not to be amused by a man who has his own "masturbatorium." Regrettably, his antics are few and far between.
The film reveals a glimmer of greatness on both ends of the spectrum, but falls short of its potential to be as witty and poignant as its source material. Rather, it is intermittently funny with an immense but detached element of tragedy that fails to elicit any strong emotional response from the audience.
Evan Rachel Wood is no stranger to angst-filled roles. But disfunction gains a whole new meaning in Running With Scissors, a star-studded indie flick that follows the true-life memoir of Augusten Burroughs. recess' Stephen Lee joined in a roundtable discussion with the rising star to get the inside scoop on portraying the tragically troubled teen Natalie Finch.
On being casted in disfunctional roles:
I'm not looking to play just dark
characters. Some of them are just teenagers being normal. Lots of teenagers are just messed up. I'm completely up for comedy. The lighter stuff is coming up.
On how she got into a dysfunctional state of mind:
I read the book and I talked to Augusten about the real Natalie and I was a little nervous because I was playing a real person that I've never met. I asked a lot of questions. Everyone has a little dysfunction in their family-skeletons in the closet. I didn't know what I was going to do with Natalie until I showed up on set with my makeup and cigarette and this character just came out of me in my platform shoes.
On the scene where she gets to smash through a ceiling:
That was the scene I was looking forward to most because everyone wants to do that at some time and every time someone lets you destroy something, you get excited because you're never allowed to do that... It was a little hard to keep our eyes open with all the dust falling. We wanted to bust through the ceiling.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.