In the beginning of “Running With Scissors,” the darkly amusing adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ best-selling memoir that opens Friday, a young lad provides his mother with a rapt audience of one.
Annette Bening plays Dierdre Burroughs, a thoroughly modern mom circa the 1970s. Dierdre organizes consciousness-raising reading groups and aspires to be a poet of Anne Sexton-like dimensions. Though, hopefully, without that scribe’s tragic end in suicide.
Dierdre reads – make that performs – a poem that is neither Sexton-quality nor age-appropriate for her only child. And as the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that the vivacious woman’s energy surges are signs of a bipolar disorder.
Directed and adapted by Ryan Murphy, “Running With Scissors” boasts a Bening turn that elicits the sort of awards-season prognosticating that attends so much of her work.
Listening to Bening talk about acting in movies and playing a woman with a mental illness, one could be forgiven for feeling a bit like young Augusten at the feet of his incandescent mom.
Unlike struggling Dierdre, Bening has hit an impressive stride. Though her three Oscar nominations aside, she’d never put it that way.
“With movies, you’re always dealing with so much uncertainty,” she said on the phone recently. The way films are made, she believes, subverts any claims to something as smooth, rhythmic and self-proclaimed as a stride.
“Some days when you’re shooting, you might have more of a sense of it than others,” she said. “You may think, ‘that was a good day.’ But a lot of the time you’re dealing in such a gray area. So much is out of your hands. It’s the director’s prerogative to keep a scene or lose a scene, to use one take versus another. All I can do is work to my own taste, and hope for the best.”
Bening’s best goes something like this: Her first Academy Award nomination came with a supporting role in Stephen Frears’ noir outing “The Grifters,” where she played a knockout swindler gifted at the con.
A nomination for a lead role came in 1999. For Sam Mendes’ “American Beauty,” she made Carol Burnham, the real-estate hawking wife of Kevin Spacey’s character, hilariously repellent.
In 2004’s witty bash, “Being Julia,” based on W. Somerset Maugham’s novel “Theatre,” Bening cuts a gem of a performance as a London diva who gets bored, has a thrilling affair with a young American, comes to her senses and wreaks a delicious bit of havoc. “Being Julia” got her a third Oscar nod.
Her turn as prep-school headmistress Jean Harris, the lover-turned-killer of Scarsdale Diet guru Herman Tarnower, in HBO’s “Mrs. Harris,” garnered an Emmy nomination this year.
The Denver connection
And before any of the screen kudos, there was a Tony nomination for her role in “Coastal Disturbances.” (Local theatergoers got an early glimpse of Bening’s talent during her mid-’80s stint with the Denver Center Theatre Company.)
In “Running With Scissors,” Bening pulsates in the midst of a talented bunch that includes Alec Baldwin, Brian Cox,
Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, and Joseph Cross as the teenage Augusten. In a welcome return to the big screen, Jill Clayburgh plays the bedraggled wife of the shrink Dierdre hands Augusten over to.
More important, Bening depicts a woman pushing against a mental illness with an intelligent verve. Yet she considered declining the role.
“I thought the material was so rich,” she said of reading Murphy’s adaptation. She also remembered thinking, “It was so asking to be over the top.” And she didn’t want to go there.
“I had no interest in quote-unquote crazy behavior,” she said. When she met with the director, she told Murphy so. “This has to be so real to be interesting to me,” she told him.
“I felt such a responsibility to that, personally. Because in real life, mental illness is no fun, no fun for anybody.” In the film, the delicate balance between funny and “no fun” rides on Bening’s performance.
“Of course, this is a very colorful woman. She’s fantastic. In her core, she has such a passion for her own life and giving her life meaning, which I find very moving. But then there’s the issue of the mental illness, which I felt really compelled, almost maniacal, about making it real.”
Of the many compelling things Dierdre strives to be, a good mother isn’t exactly one of them.
“As a reader of the screenplay, I thought ‘My god, how can this woman do what she’s doing?’ said Bening, who has four children with husband Warren Beatty.
But, she said, once she decides to take a role, she doesn’t wrestle with a character’s flaws in quite the same way.
“I get the luxury of not judging someone,” she said. “Just trying to dramatize what goes behind the words, behind what’s she’s doing, what her own rationale and reasons are. That doesn’t mean they are good or bad, they just are what they are. That’s the job of the actor. You don’t have to judge people.
“I relish that kind of uncharted territory I can find myself in with these types of characters,” she said. “That’s one of the joys. Do something new. Find something out. Make something happen that you’ve never made happen before.”
The year Bening was nominated for “American Beauty,” Hilary Swank won for “Boys Don’t Cry.” When she was nominated for “Being Julia,” she was knocked out by Swank’s “Million Dollar Baby” role.
Is this her year?
There’s no chance she’ll get Swanked this year. But there’s fine competition in the offing, which gives rise to an obvious yet clumsy question: Is it impossible to ignore awards season hoopla?
“It’s impossible to totally ignore because a lot of people ask me about it,” was her graceful reply. “The truthful answer is, I want the movie to have a life. I want people to like the movie, and I want people to like the performance. If they feel that way. I’m happy. More than that, it’s out of my hands. I’ve done my work.”
Indeed, she has.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
