Note: Having read Augusten Burrough’s memoir Running with Scissors I was looking forward to the film version, though I wondered how any film could emulate the book’s repeated pendulum swings between grotesque horrors and hysterical comedy — the kind of comedy that makes you feel a bit ashamed and dirty for laughing, and which sometimes makes you laugh all the harder. I was impressed by the film, though even as I watched it I wondered whether I was “filling in” its gaps with Augusten’s authorial voice in my head. I wanted to get a reaction to the film from someone who had not read the book — ideally someone with a thorough knowledge of mental health, since psychiatry (or an obscene parody thereof) plays important roles in all the characters’ stories. Carol Smaldino, CSW obliged and, true to form, found depths I hadn’t seen in the film’s depictions of addiction, obsession and “love.”
— Adam Blair

A good part of the film Running with Scissors is devoted to the psychotic delusions of grandeur of the “psychiatrist,” played brilliantly and frighteningly by the versatile actor Brian Cox. The power of the domination of this crazy man is such that when he is “sure” that his turd — which all in his home must see at point of urgent physical awakening by him — is a sign from God that things are on the mend, he then demands of his wife Agnes that she take a shoe horn and remove it gently to dry in the garden. After a pregnant pause in which the household members gather around in awe and anxiety, she does just that, so deadened is she and so ubiquitous and remarkable is “the doctor’s” power. He, a cult leader for this small legion of characters, reigns over an empire with his declarations, and he feeds off the depressive agony of his wife, played with haunting poignancy by Jill Clayburgh, who becomes, for most of the film, a prisoner in her own skin, a slave to the darkness of her husband’s reign.

The “doctor” is wildly medicating: the son, played with sudden shifts of mood and torment and desperate tones by Joseph Fiennes, seems destined to kill the father or himself out of the frantic hatred and seemingly endless though intermittent schizophrenic voices which he recognizes as such in his moments of lucidity; he also knows that he is morbidly dependent on the father who is “killing him softly” with degrading comments and random use of pills destined never to quell the terror of any voice but only to pacify and enrage.

One must, of course, enter the realm of Augusten’s mother, played ravagingly by Annette Bening, whose desperate and empty narcissism is ready for almost any promise of glory, no matter the price, and who becomes a puppet of the doctor’s whims for most of the film. He for all practical purposes assigns to her one lesbian partner who temporarily fills her void, while her “classes” for aspiring poets are filled with those willing to take her fury. And he leads her to institutionalization of body and spirit and to giving up her son Augusten — of course to the care of the doctor.

And there is Gwyneth Paltrow, in her gloriously understated madness and — again — submission to her father, the very same doctor. The other daughter, played with stunning shifts from and to deflation, defiance and despair by Evan Rachel Wood, moves frantically between hatred, rebellion, self-hatred and clarity. She has a clarity and hopefulness which last for moments at a time and it is Augusten, her friend and companion (and the memoir’s author) who ultimately possesses enough of that clarity to choose to board a bus and to get to a better place, and begin to have a life in a new present.

The doctor is mad, he is seductive, he is mesmerizing: and yet he can only be so in the context of the vast emptiness and vulnerability of his cast of characters. He could only maintain such power in this context, else he would be lonely enough for his nightmares to come unadorned by the pathology of others behind whom he might hide. We see the nature of addiction: the desperate surrender of self to a figure of power. There is little love in this film; rather there is the magical wish for completion and acceptance. The doctor is a figure who is starkly malignant in his control, and perhaps the viewer might wonder how on earth or even in hell he can achieve the grandiose position accorded him by his “servants” — namely all who get caught up in his web. Some of these victims are accompanied to their nadir: their minds lost, their psychic destruction confirmed.