Running With Scissors 04/20/07

This movie starts out like this: (Blackout) Maybe this is how I should tell the story of my life (paraphrased somewhat.) 
Bad news bears alert! Do you know what you're doing or not? You don't know where to start this movie? Maybe it should start like this? We need a little more confidence here in the tale. Why even a voiceover? just start it: This is what happened. Authoritative, direct. Don't waste my time, figuring out what you're trying to do at the beginning. 
This movie suffers from a more mild identity crisis. It tries to be a comedy, but there's nothing funny about a true story like this. Sure one can insert humor in here and there as comic relief but don't expect me to laugh at these poor poor people. They easily win my pity not my scorn. Mental illness of course can be very serious. Especially when you're mother is seeing an even crazier shrink who drugs her out of her mind in order to adopt her kid along with his monthly child support check. Throughout the movie we get the sense that author is somewhat afraid of people's reactions. So he puts up this fence to show that he himself is above the entire mess. He makes it known and clear to the audience that this movie is supposed to be funny. Which wouldn't be a problem if what really didn't make people laugh is someone telling us outright that we should. Like I said before this movie needs more confidence. Not just in themselves but also in the audience. They need to trust that we will want to find the story interesting or funny. Is that not why were here watching the movie? Paticularly in the first quarter the movie holds our hands a little too much. It gets better though.
We have good performances all around. Most notably from the adults, Cox, Bening, and Baldwin, who seems to be in every movie nowadays. The younger charachters not so much, but then again there's not much to them and its probably pretty hard to play a homosexual schizophrenic as if you know what you're doing. 
The director's ability is somewhat in flux also. Again toward the beginning. He loves doing interesting things with the camera sure and I respect the ambition but there's a reason we have an editing room. Like bad jokes in comedies, if a montage doesn't work or has no purpose than it shouldn't be in the picture. We have quite the montages in this film, slow motion, pop music, fast-forward, snow from the ceilings. About three quarters of them work. Another quarter doesn't. Where's that asshole producer when you need him.
Is this is going to turn into that review that bashes the picture the entire time but then recommends it. Unfortunately yes. Why? Because as I said, it has problems. But three fourths of the time it works, and the story is more interesting and ambitious than most of the stuff out there. So while it may not have reached its perfection as a story, the goal was set up high and a failure at this level is respectable.