Review: Running with Scissors Directed by Ryan Murphy

Augusten Burroughs' Story Takes a Zany Looks at Adolescence on the Big Screen

Who doesn’t love a good, awkward teenage-coming-of-age story? Running With Scissors is that story—and so much more. Based on the popular memoir of the same name, the film chronicles the unbelievable, side-splitting adolescence of Augusten Burroughs, a normal kid whose circumstances are anything but. 

Screenwriter and director Ryan Murphy (who got industry experience writing for the small-screen, with the show “Nip/Tuck”) takes liberties in his portrayal of Augusten’s (played by Joseph Cross) messy upbringing. The laughs are inevitable, though you quickly realize that this film outlines a real person’s life, thus quieting some of the hilarity of it all. 

Through a strange course of events, Augusten goes to live with his mother’s quirky psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox). This is after he’s already wished himself out of his own family and into one more “normal.” His parents Deirdre and Norman (Annette Benning, Alec Baldwin) spent every moment of their marriage cursing and blaming the other, with violent outbursts. Every verbal jab between these two, no matter how funny it is to the audience, must also be processed on a deeper level. In other words, the film comes off as a comedic drama, and not the other way around. 

The Burroughs inevitably separate, which leaves Augusten, now just over 13, with his crazed writer of a mother, and her weekly poetry groups (which are honestly nothing more than artisic man-bashing sessions). After her all-too-creepy shrink Dr. Finch suggests that Deirdre may not be mentally stable enough to be a mother, she willingly gives her teenage son to be adopted by the Finch family—a more bizarre ancestry than the average person can imagine.