Run, Don't Walk

Away from Running with Scissors.

by Cindy Fuchs

Augusten Burroughs has a crazy mom. Excitable, delusional and erratic, Deirdre (Annette Bening) is at once frightening and pathetic, delusional and wholly unable to set the usual "boundaries" for her befuddled son. Augusten (Joseph Cross) begins his narration of Running with Scissors with a question about this lack of order that has shaped his world: "How do I begin to tell the story of how my mother left me and how I left her?"

SCARY MOMSTER: Augusten Burroughs (Joseph Cross, left) with terrifying mom Annette Bening.

Adapted from Burroughs' 2002 memoir, Ryan Murphy's movie poses this question in a circular, often comical manner that underlines the boy's fear and the mother's fault. As a child, he's thrilled to be "special" like Deirdre, defining himself in opposition to his miserably alcoholic dad Norman (Alec Baldwin) and happy to stay home from school in order to design Deirdre's hair for upcoming parties or poetry readings. At first, Augusten, wearing the white turtleneck considered chic at the time (1972), looks pleased to participate in mom's "liberation." But then her awful, Anne Sexton-inspired work ("Childhood is gone!/ What remains?") takes other forms. When a fight with Norman ends with him on the kitchen floor, forehead bloody after a loud slam into a cupboard, Augusten sees the consequences of her endless anger.

Frustrated by her poetry group ("Get the rage on the page," she exhorts her assembly of intimidated housewives), Deirdre takes up therapy and medication. At this point, the film's maybe-antic tone turns grim. When Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) agrees with Deirdre that her husband is a "narcissist," then invites them to glimpse his inner sanctum (the Masturbatorium, where he keeps portraits of Queen Elizabeth II and Golda Meier), Norman walks out.

This abandonment is not as horrific as Deirdre's, however. Following a visit to Dr. Finch's home, she appears drugged and delirious, handing over her son to Finch's family while she heads to a motel room for further "treatment." The family is "quirky," as such families tend to be in movies, their damage less funny than condescending and creepy. The weary Mrs. Finch (Jill Clayburgh) eats doggie kibble for her TV snack, barely tending to her daughters, the devoutly though rather abstractly religious Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the tediously "rebellious" Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood). Expressive and punkish, she enchants Augusten.

Soon adopted by Finch and in bed with another, very damaged, adoptee, the darkly manic, 35-year-old Bookman (Joseph Fiennes), Augusten suffers with and without Deirdre. Organized by assorted traumas, Running with Scissors seems dated and smug (think: The World According to Garp). With outsized Oscar-bait performances, it careens from scene to scene, dropping in Deirdre's lesbianism — with her poetry student Fern (Kristin Chenoweth) and then the Finch-selected Dorothy (Gabrielle Union) — as yet more evidence of her delirious search for "herself." By the time Augusten makes his escape, you're way ahead of him.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Running With Scissors

Directed by Ryan MurphyA Sony Pictures releaseOpens Friday at Ritz Five