Unsharpened Scissors

The chief problem is tedium. Director-screenwriter Ryan Murphy applies the same hollow bombast that characterizes his overheated, overrated FX plastic-surgery drama series, Nip/Tuck, to Scissors' supposedly outrageous goings-on, but it fails to enliven what amounts to a bitchy, repetitive diatribe against clingy mothers and manipulative shrinks. (As if we haven't heard enough about them.) Hewing closely to the early portions of the book, Murphy's film follows the 13-year-old Burroughs (Joseph Cross), a sensitive lad torn between his bipolar poet mom (Annette Bening) and alcoholic dad (Alec Baldwin), to the home of Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), an eccentric, Svengali-like shrink with whom he's consigned to live. Other broadly drawn, pointedly zany/tragic characters also inhabit the house, including the doc's depressive wife (Jill Clayburgh) and tortured daughters (Evan Rachel Wood and Gwyneth Paltrow), and a thirtysomething psychotic (Joseph Fiennes) who becomes young Augusten's lover.

In line with his one-note, TV-nurtured auteurism, Murphy fails to bring the movie's relationships convincingly to life, and his stab at muting Burroughs' winking jokiness and general hysteria pushes the tale's pathos even further into dull, earnest sentimentality. Without the wan consolation of the author's zingy, satire-for-dummies one-liners, Scissors is about as engaging as an acquaintance's psychotherapy session. This puts an extra burden on the cast, some of whom bear it better than others. Cross maintains a nimble charm by not taking himself or the material too seriously, while Clayburgh exhibits a sedate (and sedated) integrity that's the movie's one truly touching facet; she deserves a more thoughtful comeback vehicle. Baldwin is also fine as ever, but Cox, fresh from his infinitely more challenging stint on the tricky last season of Deadwood, just seems perturbed and distracted.

Visually and aurally, Murphy borrows more than a few tricks from the Wes Anderson playbook—including incessant pop-tune cues and whimsical compositional formality—in an attempt to give the story's mash-up of poor-me sentimentality and snarky character assassination some gravity. Thus, the movie's characters are routinely framed in rigorously symmetrical, hypercomposed two-shots, and the action is underscored by songs we've all heard so many times (probably in other movies) that their emotional impact has vaporized. For want of Anderson's off-kilter warmth and daring humanism, the results more accurately capture Burroughs' preternaturally bogus prose than anything in The Royal Tenenbaums, and Murphy and cinematographer Christopher Baffa (another Nip/Tuck alum) come off as bland copycats.

This staleness permeates the entire film, though, especially given the presence of Tenenbaums' perpetually moody Paltrow (in what amounts to her second cameo, after Infamous, this month) and Bening, who did a similarly self-loathing turn in 1999's American Beauty—a smugly narcissistic movie this one resembles, if not outright mimics, in tone and purpose. Perhaps such blatant recycling is a signal that the quirkily dysfunctional family genre has finally run its course as thoroughly as those grandiosely fabricated memoirs cluttering bookstore shelves. In either medium, Scissors' effect is less like sprinting with a sharp object than shuffling with a butter knife.