UNKIND CUTS IN SHINING SUBURBS

By Derek Malcolm

From The Guardian (London), 07.25.1991

Tim Burton once made a film called Frankenweenie for Disney. It was the project of an animator who had turned to live action for the first time. Edward Scissorhands, much more than Batman or Beetlejuice, betrays the same origins. It's essentially a dark, oblique fairy tale often envisaged as an animator might.

Edward (Johnny Depp) is the creation of Vincent Price's veteran scientist. He's veteran enough to die of a heart attack just before he's completed his task with Edward, leaving him alone in his mansion on the edge of suburbia, bereft of hands and with scissors in their place.

This makes him an excellent topiarist but a lonely and quizzical soul who is eventually taken off to the shining suburbs of whole humanity by Dianne Weist's shy but kindly Avon lady. She can't sell him cosmetics but she can 'normalise' him within her family.

It is a process fraught with some difficulty, since the hands make ordinary tasks virtually impossible. Edward rips clothes, cuts himself scratching, and is altogether a little dangerous to know, despite his pussycat nature. What he can do brilliantly, however, apart from clipping hedges, is to fashion hairdos that the women of the neighbourhood find mark them out as something special.

They live, in Avon-like propriety, within the portals of well-ordered houses that look like boxes of cosmetics. They are pastel pink and blue and green, and very, very neat. This is a world waiting for someone to astonish it with passionate unorthodoxy, and Edward is just the man to do it.

But any kind of oddity, though at first welcomed, is not what it really wants. Winona Ryder is there for Edward to love but she's promised to another (Anthony Michael Hall) who will turn the community against this odd stranger if he can.

The film is often beautifully stylised, transcending even the art direction of Batman (which was the best thing about that unsatisfactorily told tale). It is also very well performed in a naturalistic fashion that sets the fantasy in truth and makes it credible.

There is Alan Arkin as the Avon lady's husband, Oscar-winner Kathy Bates as a nosey neighbour and, of course, Vincent Price to prove that a mere cameo can steal more than that bit of the film in which it operates.

Above all, Depp, whom we know best from John Waters' Cry Baby, plays the almost silent hero of the piece with becoming modesty and grace, suggesting both vulnerability and an open propensity to charm these ladies out of their smooth skins.

This is essentially Frankenweenie meets The Stepford Wives and, though the darker it gets the less effective it becomes (Americans are not very good at irony), the whole is a refreshing change from any current Hollywood norm. Burton is a real film-maker, equipped with imagination and the technical means to display it properly.

What he can't yet do is turn the screw tight enough to create real drama so that his and Caroline Thompson's finely detailed story never totally catches fire. It's a fairy tale that ought to carry a little more weight than it does. It's not a feeble one but there should be more iron in its soul.