|
 By
Ann Morrow
Running
With Scissors
Directed
by Ryan Murphy
Adapted from the memoir by Aug usten Burroughs, Running
With Scissors is about a boy growing up in the 1970s in
a dysfunctional family from hell. Actually, it’s two families
from hell: Augusten (Joseph Cross) is given up for adoption
by his mother, Deirdre (Annette Bening), to her psychiatrist
while in his early teens. In the movie adapted and directed
by Ryan Murphy, Deirdre dominates the screen as well as Augusten’s
life. She writes mediocre poetry and fantasizes about becoming
as famous as Anne Sexton. She picks horrendous fights with
her husband, Norman (Alec Baldwin), a passive alcoholic. Her
feminist, anti-establishment, self- actualization diatribes
are shrieked uncontrollably: In one early scene, she hysterically
analyzes Norman’s homicidal misogyny while he’s knocked out
cold, and bleeding from her spiteful attack.
As a child, Augusten is supportive and proud of his mother’s
“artistic” ambitions, but as he grows older, her attacks on
his father make it difficult for him to live a normal life.
Enter Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), who prescribes Valium for Deirdre
and asks about her bowel movements. Due to Murphy’s direction,
it’s one of the film’s most ghastly-funny scenes; Murphy is
even more incisive with Deirdre’s poetry club, where she intimidates
her suburban friends with her hipster espousal of self-expressive
anger.
The first half of Running with Scissors alternates
between unnerving black satire and queasy social realism targeted
with accuracy at the sick side of the 1970s. Dr. Finch manipulates
Norman out of the marriage, and Deirdre, zonked on a medicine
cabinet’s worth of prescription pills, agrees to let him adopt
Augusten. The Finch household is like an EST-and-polyester
version of a Bosch nightmare, and Murphy takes on too much
of the memoir: Finch’s crazy-quilt family encompasses (a tired-looking)
Gwyneth Paltrow as his older, and certifiably insane daughter;
Evan Rachel Wood as his vampy but somewhat stable younger
daughter; Jill Clayburgh as his worn-out, doormat wife; and
Joseph Fiennes as his adopted son, a gay biker psycho. Cox
steals the movie as the criminally unhinged but convivial
doctor, distorting the seriousness of the satire.
Mild-mannered like his father, Augusten tries to make the
best of his appalling circumstances, and his even keel is
admirable. But as the film goes on too long, from one drug-induced
crisis to another, the bizarre strata of his young adulthood
(psychoanalysis, pharmacology, feminism, patriarchal privilege,
the sexual revolution, the counterculture, and the disintegration
of the nuclear family) blurs into a strung-out blob of strobe-lit
lava. Like Augusten, many viewers may find themselves just
waiting for it to be over.
Separated
at Birth?
Infamous
Directed
by Douglas McGrath
Of course, the first question that comes to mind is, “Was
it as good as Capote?” It’s an unfair question; insofar
as Infamous—or any movie—deserves to be judged on its
own merits. But the fact that both movies share not only a
subject, writer Truman Capote, but a very specific section
of the subject’s life, the years during which he worked on
his groundbreaking true-crime classic In Cold Blood,
makes the comparison hard to escape. The additional fact that
Infamous was released so shortly after Capote was
nominated for Best Picture and Phillip Seymour Hoffman
won the Oscar for his portrayal of the flamboyant author makes
the comparison nigh inevitable. So, let’s get it out of the
way:
No. Infamous is not as good as Capote.
Where Capote was minimal, austere, even bleak, Infamous
is garish, flip, even silly. Where Capote focused on
the writer as a writer, Infamous focuses on the writer
as a personality. Both Hoffman, in the former, and Toby Jones
in the latter, do commendable jobs in capturing Capote’s mincing
postures and effeminate speech (in fact, Jones is rather frighteningly
similar in physical appearance), and both present Capote as
a befuddling mix of qualities: driven, affectionate, self-destructive,
pompous, insecure, eloquent, grandiose, charming, self-absorbed.
But where Hoffman’s Capote was a compelling puzzle, Jones’
is a cloying punchline.
Jones is not solely at fault. It is clearly writer-director
Douglas McGrath’s opinion that Capote was laughable. There
are not enough a’s in flaaaaaming to describe the scenes in
which Capote first travels to conservative Kansas to dig up
info on the multiple homicide that will be the basis of his
book. And the Kansans themselves (including the usually spot-on
Jeff Daniels) are portrayed as slack-jawed bumpkins. These
bits play less like a movie than a scene from a formulaic
sitcom, Alf with a lisp. You can almost hear the laugh
track and theme music to That Darn Gay!
If there were any chance of the audience missing the point
that Capote is ridiculous, Sandra Bullock is on hand, as Capote’s
lifelong friend Harper Lee, shaking her head in comic exasperation
at each of his faggy excesses. Terrified, apparently, that
even this blatant handholding will fail, McGrath uses repeated
jump cuts to underscore that Capote is a lying, untrustworthy,
flighty gossip: He has Capote swear that he will do, or not
do, a particular thing then he immediately cuts to him doing
exactly the opposite of what he has sworn—again and again
and again.
So, taken on its own merits, Infamous is slight and
unserious. It is also predictable, which renders it unserious
but unfunny. However, since the unavoidable comparison has
already been made, it does provide an interesting counterpart—a
kind of Rashomon alternate view—to Capote. There
are subtle differences in interpretation and dramatic differences
in the presentation of “fact” that serve as reminders that
creative nonfiction—including the biopic—is a particularly
slippery category. Taken together, the films may be an appropriate
homage to a pretty slippery character.
—John
Rodat
Blunted Message
Catch
a Fire
Directed
by Phillip Noyce
You’d have to be brain-dead not to recognize the obvious parallels
between the South African apartheid of Phillip Noyce’s movie
Catch a Fire and current debates about interrogation
techniques and the rights of political prisoners. Watching
as Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), an oil-refinery foreman
who is also avowedly apolitical, is tortured for a crime that
we, the audience, know he didn’t commit, is the stuff of nightmares,
especially when the interrogator, Nic Vos (Tim Robbins) is
a quasi-sympathetic fellow countryman. For Vos, who is with
the Police Security Branch, South Africa is just as much his
home, if not more, than for Patrick, who hails from Mozambique.
The delicacies of race and notions of home and country are
intertwined tautly throughout the tale of Chamusso’s evolution
to political terrorist.
That said, Shawn Slovo’s script leaves something to be desired.
For all the inherent drama and suspense, the movie feels a
little formulaic. A huge chunk of suspense is stripped away
when you remember just who is narrating it. Luke, who was
mesmerizing in the title role in Antwone Fisher, is
sometimes compelling, as when he struggles to regain his dignity
in the midst of the degradation of the interrogation cell,
or when he begs Vos, man to man, not to reveal a past infidelity
to his wife Precious (Bonnie Henna). But as a man hell-bent
on revenge and redemption, he comes off less solidly.
Noyce’s best moments are those in which the human element
comes to the fore, in which what matters most in a given instant
is not so much the political reality but quixotic human emotions.
The way in which Vos plays not just with Patrick’s mind, but
especially the proud and temperamental Precious, is masterful
and chilling, far more compelling and demonstrably more disturbing
than the so-called action sequences. While the filmmakers
aren’t quite successful at depicting Vos in the sort of multidimensional
way that would auger complexity—and possibly even a grain
of sympathy—it is downright creepy watching this master torturer
sing peace songs with his family and strum his guitar.
Unfortunately, much of the good stuff dissipates at film’s
end, when the real-life Chamusso talks about his life today.
It’s an ending that feels tacked on, as if the moviemakers
wanted to make sure we went home feeling happy—rather than
risk making us think long and hard about the actions we condone,
if only by our collective silence.
—Laura
Leon
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