If you think your childhood was a mess and your parents were certifiably crazy, your experience has nothing on that of Agustine Burrows.

Burrows’ childhood, specifically his teen years, is the main focus of the new film, “Running with Scissors.” The film stars Joseph Cross in the title role, which is one of the best casting decision of the film – Cross looks bewildered and like he has no idea what is going on around him, making him easy for the audience to indentify with.

The film holds no punches. We are thrown in to Burrows’ unsusual childhood, beginning when he is a young child who polishes his allowance because he likes the coins to be shiny. His dad, Norman, (Alec Baldwin in a great role that unfortunately is way to small) is an alcoholic and his mother, Dierdre, (Annette Benning, in her best role since “American Beauty”) doesn’t seem to be all there.

Then we are brought to Burrows’ teen years where the rest of the film develops. After a drunken fight, Dierdre and Norman divorce after Dierdre’s psychologist, Dr. Finch, recommends it when Norman refuses to spend days in therapy fixing his marriage.

Dierdre continues to see Dr. Finch, who puts her into a drug-induced haze with all the medications she has been prescribed. Convinced her ex-husband wants to kill her, Dierdre drops Augustine off at Dr. Finch’s house and tells him he must stay there with him.

That’s where the story picks up. Dr. Finch, supposedly a man of honour and prestige, lives in a pink house with a messy yard covered with junk. The dishes are never clean, the Christmas tree has been up for years. Finch’s family, on appearance, may be crazier than Dierdre.

His wife, Agnes (played magnificently by Jill Clayburgh), eats dog kibble while watching television, his eldest daughter, Hope (Gwyenth Paltrow) in convinced she is there to do God’s work and hears Him speak to her, as well as her animals, middle daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood) shows promise to succeed – if she could escape her father, and rejected adopted son Neil Bookman (Joseph Finnes) re-emerges to seduce Burrows who has discovered he is gay.

We follow Burrows as he searches for his father, then seeks out his mother, before coming to terms with the fact that his birth family deserted him, but that everyone in his new family isn’t as strange as they seem.

All actors provide outstanding performances, but there are a handful that stand out. The audience gets lost in Bennings desent in to madness, and through her drugged hazes, the audience tries to understand her slurred speech. She provides the audience with the ability to pity her, instead of hating her. It would be so easy to hate a woman who willingly gives away her son, but instead Benning provides a look at a stunningly sad woman to the audience.

The role of Baldwin as Norman is his best role to date. Although as mentioned, we do not get enough screen time of him, that is actually a good thing. By taking him away for most of the movie, despite wanting to see more of him, the audience feels how Burrows does when his father leaves. We want more, but we aren’t going to get it.

Evan Rachel Wood as Natalie is amazing, as usual. We see the promise in the young woman and her desire to escape her family, but also the love she has for them.

Jill Clayborough’s portrayl of Agnes – a woman caught between her husband and his madness – is mindnumblingly beautiful. At first glance, Agnes seems as crazy as the rest of her family, but as the movie moves on we see the soul that is in her, and her ability to be the mother to Augustine that she may never have been to her children, nor the kind of mother Augustine had ever had.

Finally Joseph Burrows. Never seeing a movie this young actor was in paid off for me. I had no expectations, no comparisons of him, nothing. And it is because of that I empathized with this character who was lost in a world that was beyond his control, I felt his isolation, his betrayal, and his loss of inocense.

“Running With Scissors” is sometimes a movie that is very avante-garde, though it does do the occasional potty humour. It is a realistic portrayl of growing up, learning to accept the things you cannot change, and changing those you can.

And hey, anything that makes my family look normal is fine by me.






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