'SCISSORHANDS' JUST DOESN'T CUT IT

By Mick LaSalle

From The San Francisco Chronicle, 12.14.1990, Final Edition

2 Star Rating

Tim Burton, the director of Batman and Beetlejuice, brought together talented production people to create some gorgeous and impressive visuals for Edward Scissorhands, a movie that's great to look at but not much fun to watch. This modern fairy tale opens today in the Bay Area.

For all its slickness and energy, there is something essential missing from Edward Scissorhands. In tone, the movie is in the same arch, smarty-pants vein as David Lynch's Wild at Heart, in which there is always a sense that something is being made fun of, but it's not clear what--maybe the audience for sitting there.

At least Wild at Heart was funny for the first 40 minutes. In Edward the comedy caves in on itself almost from the beginning. Its satire of suburban life is strictly routine, and when the movie turns sentimental, it's all so obvious, insincere and cliched that it's hard to care at all.

Not surprisingly, the background visuals provide the picture's best jokes. Take your eyes off the actors and look at the walls, and you'll see middle-class curios, such as a clock in the shape of a sun burst. The neighborhood in which the movie takes place is made up of identical, single-story pastel houses, all of them either blue, pink, green or yellow.

Edward, of course, is not from this part of the neighborhood. He was created in the Gothic mansion overlooking the town by a kindly inventor, played by Vincent Price. In place of hands, he has two long scissors, twin gardening shears, coming out of each arm. The Inventor had planned to give Edward a set of normal hands but dropped dead before he could install them. Tough luck.

Edward is discovered one day by Peg (Dianne Wiest), the local Avon lady. She takes pity on the poor creature and brings him back to her middle-class home. Edward has trouble feeding himself and on two occasions accidentally punctures the water bed, but he soon becomes a neighborhood celebrity, sculpting hedges into animal designs and giving the local women lopsided haircuts, which they consider chic.

The actors do as best they can in roles that call for them to act silly and behave in ways that make no logical sense. Alan Arkin fares best of all, playing Peg's husband Bill as an unflappable middle-class Dad. He's so grounded in practical matters that the miracle of an android living in his home just doesn't faze him. Winona Ryder almost manages to inject some genuine feeling into the movie, playing Peg and Bill's daughter, Kim, who gradually falls in love with Edward. Unfortunately, she sees a lot more in Edward than the audience does.

Edward never becomes real. To the extent that he's anything, he's grotesque and closed off, pitiful without being affecting. But mostly he seems an idea for a character, an empty costume that we're expected to endow with all the noble sentiments associated with the kind-hearted outsider. Johnny Depp does his best to look adorable in his Edward frightwig and white pancake makeup. He even adopts a childlike walk, which he supposedly got from watching Chaplin but which looks more like the walk Andy Kaufman used on "Taxi." For all the effort, his performance, like the movie, is at best an interesting exercise.

Anthony Michael Hall, all grown up and mean-looking, plays Jim, Kim's boyfriend, who hates Edward even more than I hated the movie. Hall's straight-ahead nastiness is welcome in this emotionally uncommitted picture that's smirky and mawkish, by turns, and at heart, empty.