Daily Blague

Yesterday, I had a choice to make - at the last minute. Both movies were starting at the same theatre (the Kips Bay 15) and at the same time (eleven in the morning). Across Second Avenue from the theatre, I called my old friend for advice. Marie Antoinette or Running With Scissors? He confirmed my predilection. Running With Scissors. Let's face it: one of the two films starred Annette Bening. What's to decide? I'm a huge fan of Kirsten Dunst in The Cat's Meow, but, in the end, Ms Bening trumps Versailles.

I'll cut to the chase: I liked Running With Scissors so much that I went straight to Barnes & Noble to buy the book. I noted all of the shortcomings that the critics have pointed out, but I still loved the movie. Like The Royal Tenenbaums, it is obviously a film that will many viewers will loathe. When you play with (a) narrative conventions and (b) familial psychopathology at the same time, you are inevitably going to trample a few toes. And Ryan Murphy, with only one prior feature under his belt, still has a few things to learn. But the power of Augusten Burroughs's story guarantees a funny movie. When you have a sweet gay kid who yearns for a totally normal life but who is thrust into a situation in which being gay is probably the most normal thing going on at the moment, it's going to be funny no matter how much heartbreak there is. At the end of an early chapter in the book, Mr Burroughs expresses the hopes that he had when his parents got through their awful divorce and his mother took an apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts: "Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal."

NOT!

The movie gets away with murder because it partakes of the story's chaos. Little Augusten (James Cross) is always being told that he must go to school more often, but there is never any disciplinary follow-up. This is because there are no genuine adults in his life. His father (Alec Baldwin) is a high-functioning alcoholic, his mother (Ms Bening) is a demented narcissist, and his therapist, Dr Finch (Brian Cox), is an opportunistic con man. When Finch adopts Augusten (for the child support, really), it is not long before the boy loses his virginity to/is raped by a thirty-something "half-brother" (Joseph Fiennes) who is not only gay but schizophrenic as well. Other inmates of the Finch household include Agnes (Jill Clayburgh, in one of the most wonderful performances that she has given), the sort-of mom, and her daughters, prim Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow) and lubricious Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood). The house itself is something of a character: I've never seen a more intractable mess that the one in the Finch's kitchen. Even so, Augusten would rather hang out at the Finches' pink junkyard than go to school. At the end, about to leave for New York, with no money and no education and not even a cosmetology license, he says, "It could be worse. I could be going to a prom."

The miracle of Annette Bening's extraordinarily generous performance is that she makes you come to share Augusten Burroughs's horror of his mother's astronomical self-absorption. You not identify with this woman. One other note: if nine year-old Jack Kaeding, who plays the young Augusten, keeps those huge blue eyes of his through puberty, he's going to be a big star himself in about ten years.