'EDWARD SCISSORHANDS' IS A FAIRY TALE OF 'SHEAR' PURITY

By John Hartl

From The Seattle Times, 12.14.1990, Friday, Final Edition

Frankenstein meets Peter Pan in Spielbergian suburbia in this delicate, endearing Gothic fairy tale for the 1990s.

The director, Tim Burton, immediately establishes an atmosphere of enchantment and sustained whimsy by showering the 20th Century Fox logo with a snowstorm, and he keeps the film suspended in this magical state until it reaches its bittersweet, uncompromised finale.

In the title role, Johnny Depp is otherworldly perfection, playing a boy who has scissors instead of hands; he was created by a semi-mad, now-deceased scientist (played by Vincent Price, of course). Dianne Wiest is the soul of matronly generosity as the Avon lady who finds and adopts him, and Burton's Beetlejuice discovery, Winona Ryder, fits right in as Wiest's daughter, who is initially put off by Edward but eventually finds herself drawn to his unworldly world view.

The Price character created Edward in a Gothic castle plunked down in the middle of a 1950-ish suburban block (the incongruity is barely noted by the pastel-addicted residents), and he died before he could finish the job. As a result, Edward is a freakish mixture of childlike humanity and shear destructiveness, doomed never to grow up or share a home with other creatures.

But he does have ugly-duckling talents that, for a while, endear him to people. Barely able to lift food off a plate, he's nevertheless a whiz with haircuts, dog grooming and shrubbery-trimming. Like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster, he also has a trusting sweetness that gets him in trouble, mostly because it's tied up with his inability to read people's hidden motives.

When a housewife (Kathy Baker) has an orgasmic response to the haircut he's just given her, or a jock bully (Anthony Michael Hall) lures him into a trap, he doesn't know how to respond. His bewilderment and blind fury transform him into a menace, at least to the closed-in society to which he tries to adjust.

Because Edward Scissorhands is Burton's most personal film, it's received some knocks for being his most self-indulgent as well. Unlike Batman, Beetlejuice and Pee-wee's Big Adventure, it was his creation from the beginning, and it's been criticized for its use of stock characters (especially the roles played by Baker and Hall) and his reliance on freaky art direction, Danny Elfman's music and charmingly fake special effects--all of which have become Burton signatures.

But the film has an unapologetically adolescent purity about it that transcends what would ordinarily be the shortcomings of its script. Burton creates his own world, makes his own rules, as do few other filmmakers working in American major-studio productions.

The movie is shot through with moods, sounds and images that cannot be mistaken for those of any other filmmaker. The squeaky scissor sounds of Edwards' "hands," the dreamy assembly line of Price's toy bakery, a dinner-table ethics discussion led by Alan Arkin, Ryder's ecstatic dance in an scissor-sculpted snowstorm, a fundamentalist's tango-beat version of a Christmas carol, a little girl listening to a bedtime story while lost in a huge, enveloping bed--these touches are pure Burton.

On one level, Edward Scissorhands can be read as a paranoid, undoubtedly autobiographical teen fantasy, about a misfit who is incapable of finding his place in the adult world. As such, it may seem thin and self-pitying.

But Burton's direction raises it to another level: that of an enchanted nostalgic fable, told by an old woman who remembers the hero just as Wendy remembers Peter Pan--not as a tragic figure, but as a lost boy who found his own reason for being.