A nip here, a tuck there

To seperate Annette Bening's performance from the film in which it plays so central a role is impossible; context is all, alas.

I haven't read Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors, which has remained on the best-sellers list in its hardcover and paperback incarnations for the last three years. Let me make a crass deduction: some fraction of its success is due to the American public's hunger for the palliating polysyllabic jargon which has tainted our language as much as it's helped the public understand what ails them. It soothes, it medicates, retained by the body instead of being excreted or pissed out.

The film doesn't take Bening's hysterics seriously; it doesn't take any of its characters seriously. Absent a dose of the kind of wise irony that mediates derision and complacency, Running With Scissors anestheticizes its audience with Hollywoodian humanism, in which characters wear mental illness like actors did those little red AIDS bows in the early nineties: the phony solidarity signifies defiance against the straight world; sexuality is merely a universal condition, like halitosis and untrimmed toenails. The film's purportedly gay protagonist is allowed more chemistry with adopted sister Evan Rachel Wood than with the thirtysomething man (Joseph Fiennes) who deflowers him (in the book Burroughs describes a virtual rape). I felt more sympathy for the monstrous absent father, played with subtly gradated despair by Alec Baldwin (Stephanie Zancharek: "Watching him, I kept thinking of the Delmore Schwartz poem `The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me,' a lament about the limits, and the clumsiness, of the bodies our spirits are locked up in."). How does Burroughs escape? By moving to New York City, of course. That director Ryan Murphy doesn't trouble young Burroughs' imagination with fantasies of what NYC must be like during the most hedonistic period of the century (the late seventies) is indicative.

The creator of "Nip/Tuck" craves acceptance too, demonstrating his fealty to Hollywood tradition by effacing its own history; like mental illness, it's enough to simply allude to history for brownie points. It never occurred to Murphy that in casting Jill Clayburgh, the has-been star of the unbelievable but honest An Unmarried Woman, he tipped his hat to an era in which neuroses was at least probed and tested. Running With Scissors casts her as a morose hausfrau who munches on cat food while watching "Dark Shadows." Refusing makeup in an attempt to look "ugly" in the classic Hollywood way of signaling a comeback (a la Gloria Swanson and Ellen Burstyn), she shows up Bening's self-congralutatory bravura; and since Clayburgh is such a good sport, she's given a last scene between her and Joseph Cross that's Academy Award baiting of the most heinous kind.