Running With
   Scissors
   Cast:
Annette Be-C- ning, Alec Baldwin, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jill Clayburgh

Director:
Ryan Murphy

Rating:
R for language, sexuality, violence, substance abuse

Running time:
121 minutes Running With Scissors starts out bursting with promise.
   A seriously mental woman. Her adoring little boy. A psychiatrist crazier than any of his patients. An eccentric-filled fun house.
   Based on Augusten Burroughs' best-selling memoir of growing up dysfunctional, this film promises black comedy, outrageous affrontery and sizzling satire. And for about 20 minutes it delivers.
   After that the movie sinks into a quirky rut and wears out its welcome. It's one thing to give us a cast of major talents playing bizzarro characters. But a movie needs a plot, a dramatic spine, a sense that the characters are growing and changing.
   The unhappy inhabitants of Running With Scissors, though, might as well be frozen in amber. They keep repeating the same wacky scenarios over and over and over.
   Young Augusten (played as a child by impossibly angelic Jack Kaeding) adores his mother Deirdre (Annette Bening). To him she's beautiful and glamorous and talented. He's an eager audience as she recites stanzas from her self-published book A Poet's Struggle.
   In fact, Deirdre is seriously demented, convinced of her artistic greatness and devoted to coddling Augusten and making life miserable for her long-suffering, quietly inebriated husband (an empathetic Alec Baldwin). At the same time she's miserably unhappy, which is why she's a regular of Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), a goateed shrink whose advice is almost guaranteed to be just the opposite of what the situation requires. "Get the rage on the page, woman!" he barks at his artistically blocked patient.
   Deirdre sends Augusten to live with Dr. Finch's family in a pink-columned mansion that's falling apart and littered with junk. It's a little like You Can't Take It With You as performed by the residents of a psych ward.
   Mrs. Finch (Jill Clayburgh) is a drab housewife addicted to the soap opera Dark Shadows, which she watches while scarfing handfuls of dog kibble.
   The oldest Finch daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a prissy snob who claims she can communicate with cats. The younger one, Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood), is a destructive rebel and sexually aggressive, not that it means much to the teenage Augusten (now played by Joseph Cross), who is gay. And then there's the doctor's thirtysomething son, Neil (Joseph Fiennes), a directionless head case.
   Since the Finches have a tendency to pick up strays, it's hard to say which of these are their genetic offspring and which simply fell into their orbit and have been unable to break free. They're all messed up.
   I haven't read Burroughs' memoir, but I gather it was a fascinating blend of the hilarious and the harrowing. This film version by Ryan Murphy (creator of TV's Nip/Tuck) never goes anywhere, and after a while its sameness becomes deadening.

This story was published Friday, October 27, 2006