RUNNING WITH SCISSORS – ryan murphy – 3.1 / 10

I guess the book this film is based on must be pretty good.  How else to explain how all of these demonstrably talented people got snookered into being in this film.  It’s no secret that I love Ryan Murphy’s series Nip / Tuck (the first couple seasons anyway).  And his direction and writing on that show are often exemplary.  The direction of this film (his feature debut) is workmanlike but serviceable, mostly getting out of the way of the ‘hilarious’ and ‘heartbreaking’ events of the film.  It’s the writing that fails him.  In the special features on the DVD, Augusten Burroughs, the author of the ‘personal memoir’ upon which the film is based talks at length about Murphy’s determination in pursuing this project.  That leads me to believe that Murphy feels some sort of personal connection to the weirdness on display here.  And maybe that’s why he misses the mark by so much.  Maybe he thought that other people would connect to the story as he did.  Maybe he just took for granted that the story was compelling on its own.

 
In the final analysis, I’ll never know the reason why Murphy was so taken with the ridiculous goings on in this story.  All I can say is that it bored me in a very profound way.  By the last half hour of its much too long running time, I was very tempted to just hit the fast forward button and get this thing over with.  From the beginning to the end, nothing much changes.  Everyone around Augusten either lets him down or acts balls-out crazy.  They don’t get crazier or more interesting or really do anything different from what they were doing when we first met them.  And Augusten, though he’s occasionally hurt, confused or upset by the craziness, pretty much walks the straight and narrow.  And the fact that he comes through it all okay is never in doubt.  So really, it’s not surprising that I was reaching for the remote because what’s the point in watching a film where the conclusion is foregone and nothing really happens.

I should say, though, in the film’s defense, that it held my attention for a good half hour or so.  And it even had me a little interested for most of its first hour.  A lot of the credit for that goes to the commitment of the actors and the wonderful art direction (for instance, Deidre (Annette Bening) has a poetry club that meets in her house and each of the women who attends is decked out in a specific color that seems to evoke their particular mood, that sort of thing).  But after a while this just isn't enough to hold your attention because, after all, it’s just surface stuff.  So I guess what it comes down to is that Murphy gets the superficial stuff exactly right but there’s nothing going on underneath.  And with a film that’s supposed to be about the secrets of the mind, that’s a fatal flaw.