If, like me, you thought Michelle Pfeiffer played the Worst Movie Mom Ever in WHITE OLEANDER, think again. Today I caught the movie RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, and believe me, I have been forced to think twice. In RWS, Annette Bening plays the Mom From Hell, an undoubtedly bipolar "artist" who is convinced of the reality of her own grandiose dreams. In a showdown between the two, I'm thinking Annette...
...might beat out Michelle, if only because Michelle, while no doubt a paragon of murderous antisocial personality disorder (that's sociopath to you lay people), at least had her good looks and long blonde hair working in her favor. Ryan Murphy, who adapted and directed RWS from the memoir by Augusten Burroughs, manages to make Annette (and every other adult -- lord, what happened to Jill Clayburgh?) look, as a friend of mine once described the town floozie, "ridden hard and put away wet." (Thanks, Claire!)
So, to the story. Poor Augusten (Joseph Cross) is a sensitive boy, surrounded by adults who are drunk and angry and frustrated and, despite that, say they love him. Dad (Alec Baldwin), who actually is the saner of the two, eventually leaves, with the result that Augusten is left alone with Mom, who has her bad and worse days. Mom has a shrink, the entirely creepy and unethical Dr Finch, and as events unfold, Augusten ends up living at the freaky Finch household--run by a sad, sad Agnes Finch (Jill Clayburgh) who seemingly has no affect--while Mom pursues her self-proclaimed "destiny." Which, this being the 70s, includes big jewelry, caftans, candles, and poetry groups with Sapphic overtones where Deirdre urges the participants to vent their anger through their 'art.' I am willing to concede that the 70s also bear some responsibility for Finch's overprescription of psychiatric meds and unorthodox therapy, but who knows? If both Deirdre and Augusten weren't hurting so bad, each in their own way, the whole thing might be funny, and even as is, parts of it are.
What most impresses me in these stories is how children pull from a deep well of resilience to cope with the craziness thrown their way; that, and how badly they want a stable life and and, denied that, keep trying to craft one with the crappy materials at hand. I suppose it's not PC to blame the mother here -- what she sees as "artistic" we can recognize as mentally ill. But I wanted to drag her out of the screen and slap her and say, "hey!! get out of yourself -- there's a fracking kid depending on you!!" It is heartbreaking to see Augusten try again and again to find the "normal" in the life he's been given and the Mom he has, who can't seem to help herself.
Nonetheless, life goes on. Augusten survives, with a sense of humor, and writes the memoir that becomes the movie. He seems to have learned to thrive. Who can say whether his life would have been better without Deirdre or the Finchs? As it is, he seems to have made some high-octane lemonade from the lemons he was dealt.