EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: The worlds of John Waters and Jean
Cocteau meet in a remarkably good fantasy film from Tim
Burton and the screenwriter he has needed all along, Caroline
Thompson. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4).
Tim Burton has been emblematic of what has been going wrong with popular films since STAR WARS. Burton has a very strong visual sense, but a weak story-telling ability. His BATMAN had a beautiful vision of a dark and mordant Gotham City, but the story itself was weak and even then there were gaps in the telling. His earlier BEETLEJUICE had a less developed visual sense but even worse story-telling. One moment characters would find themselves floating around the room or compelled to sing calypso, and a moment later they would be apparently overlooking the incident like they would a burp. In both films (as well as PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE) there are nice scenes but they are just not well sewn together.
My guess is that something very interesting happened with Burton's EDWARD SCISSORHANDS. Burton told his rather Oz-ian idea about a boy with scissors for hands to one Caroline Thompson. As she says, "The minute he said to me, It was so resonant and so powerful and such a clear expression of feelings that it just set the whole thing off. The story is about not being able to touch anything, about feeling that everything you touch turns to tatters. It's about being awkward." Remarkably, that was the story she was able to write and the chemistry between her story-telling ability and Burton's visual sense make a film orders of magnitude better than anything Burton has done without her.
Aside from some creative play in the very first frames of the film, the first remarkable thing about the story is the setting. You have a John Waters suburbia jammed together with a Jean Cocteau fairy tale castle. On the hill, everything is magic and unworldly, while the valley wallows in 20th century pop culture and bad taste. One day the Avon Lady (played by Diane Wiest) crosses the boundary and drives up the hill in the quest for new customers. There she finds the sad and lonely Edward Scissorhands, a dough-cutting machine incompletely transformed into a real boy, by a kindly old scientist-wizard. The wizard is a sort of likable Rotwang played by Burton's childhood idol Vincent Price. Our Avon Lady brings this enchanted creature to the less-than-enchanting suburbia where Edward (played, incidentally, by rock singer Johnny Depp) attempts to adapt and apply his talents to modern life. Edward faces a public who has a thin veneer of xenophilia over a deeper core of xenophobia. Further complicating matters, he must face his own sexual repression and stigma when attracted to Kim (played by Winona Ryder), the pretty daughter of the Avon Lady.
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS misses being a great fantasy--and I think it does miss it only marginally--by spending too much time in the John Waters world and complicating the plot with Edward having an unexplained power to unlock doors and hence being used in an illegal plot by Kim's boyfriend Jim. Jim is played by Anthony Michael Hall, and the years have not been kind to poor Anthony, I'm afraid. They have robbed him of his teenage ungainliness and left him a rather ordinary-looking adult with little screen chemistry.
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS still needs a little of the fine-tuning that could have made it a classic film of a tragic hero of the order of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. But it works for many of the same reasons PHANTOM does, with its own tragic hero suffering stigma and sexual repression. I am told that Burton likes to work over and over with the same actors--one reason why Michael Keaton was Batman--and I hope he feels the same about screenwriters. I want to see more of what Burton and Thompson can do together. I really doubted that I would ever give any Burton film a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. But Burton has finally found the magic.
Mark R. Leeper
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