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Running With Scissors
Augusten Burroughs' memoir has been at or near the top of the New York Times best seller list for non-fiction these past 127 weeks. Call me crazy, but I wonder if it would pass the Oprah veracity test if it had been published in the post-James Frey era. This tale of a camp 13-year-old boy adopted by his divorced mother's blithely uninhibited therapist, Dr Finch (Brian Cox) makes the traumatic childhood in Tarnation look like Little House on the Prairie. The cast of loonier-than-life characters includes Augusten's neurotic mom, Deirdre (Annette Bening), who styles herself an angry feminist poet and craves the acclaim to match, and who shortly falls hook, line and sinker for Finch's gospel of self-actualisation through prescription drugs and regular bowel movements. The doctor's wife, Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), mopes around like Lurch in The Addams Family, eating kibble and cleaning up after their two daughters: the favourite, Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), who converses with her cat and turns to the bible to guide her meal choices; and Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood), who likes to play doctor with her dad's electro-shock machine. Then there's the other adopted son, Neil (a moustached and Americanised Joseph Fiennes), a 35-year-old homosexual schizophrenic who becomes Augusten's first lover. 
But it's Finch himself who takes the biscuit. He maintains a private masturbatorium next door to his office, checks his stools for messages from God, and thinks nothing of supplying drugs that will put Augusten into a coma, thus sparing him from the torments of public education. By contrast, young Augusten (Joseph Cross) is almost pathetically, preternaturally normal, an innocent bystander who somehow emerges unscathed from all the madness around him, absorbing only their self-absorption. 
The film is written and directed by Ryan Murphy, whose TV show Nip/Tuck is a good deal more incisive and cutting than this over-cooked, re-heated satire of 70s 'Me Decade' solipsism. To be sure it has its moments - how could it not? - but the black comedy peters out and the drama just stagnates. Bening and Clayburgh are too good for the freaks they're asked to play. You might ask what made these women they way they are - but the movie never thinks to. Ironically, even though Finch is a monstrous and obviously barmy patriarch, the film somehow ends up inadvertently validating his narcissistic mantra: Just let it all out. It might get you on the NY Times best-seller lists after all. Tom Charity 
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