A CUT ABOVE; TIM BURTON'S EDWARD SCISSORHANDS
By Adam Mars-Jones
From The Independent (London), 07.26.1991
Christmas is coming, and Dad's on the roof making preparations.
He's already set up a festive sign in muted neon, and now he's
unrolling the snow. From our angle of vision, gazing up from
the eaves, he looks incongruously God-like as he unrolls lengths
of thick white felt from their bale, stapling them crisply near
the roofbeam. While he's working, he sings "I Saw Three
Ships Come Sailing By" in a strong, excited voice.
Dad's carol from the roof is only an incidental moment in Edward
Scissorhands, but the film is largely made up of such moments,
and it's characteristic of its weird purity of feeling. In theory,
the suburban world of Tim Burton's film is being parodied, but
as so often in contemporary American movies, parody gets all
mixed up with nostalgia and wish fulfilment.
The story, devised by Burton and Caroline Thompson and scripted
by her alone, is essentially a variant on "Beauty and the
Beast" or "Pinocchio." The hero, played by Johnny
Depp, has been made by an inventor (Vincent Price) who died before
he could fit the finishing touch to his creation--human hands.
Edward is left instead with two clumps of wicked blades. He lives
on in a Gothic mansion that abuts absurdly on suburbia, until
the Avon Lady (Dianne Wiest) comes to call.
Tim Burton has given Johnny Depp the best present a sultry,
pouting teen idol ever had--an almost complete disguise. Edward
Scissorhands' face is corpse-white, scored with delicate scars;
his lips and eyesockets are made up from a palate of bruise colours.
The contrast between his hideous manual armoury and essential
defencelessness is consistently touching and funny.
He walks with a silent-comedian's awkward grace, more Keaton
than Chaplin. Edward can interlace his blades, as people interlace
their fingers, but otherwise he cannot sheathe his weapons. Even
when he is engaged in artistic endeavour--he turns into a master
topiarist, hairdresser and pet stylist--he wears an expression
of manic desperation. His creativity is always close to panic.
When the boy whose family has adopted him takes him to school
as a living show-and-tell exhibit, he cuts paper dolls with his
terrible appendages and then relaxes, standing there shyly smiling.
The paper dolls aren't ugly or sinister, just subtly other.
As for Dianne Wiest, either there haven't been actresses with
her particular combination of qualities before, or showbiz in
its shortsightedness just wasn't interested. Her persona is neither
of weakness nor strength. She conveys a painful generosity of
spirit. In the maternal roles that she seems to get these days,
she embodies a sacrificial total love that is oddly free of neurosis.
When she smiles, her face rewrites itself and her eyes disappear
in crinkles. Her smile is a slow flinch of happiness.
The plot of the film is no more than a whisper--just enough
to stir up the necessary Transylvania-style lynch-mob of suburbanites
by the last reel. Edward Scissorhands gets by, handsomely, on
its looks, its meticulous derangement of visual expectation.
The suburb is a dream of pastel--it even looks as if cars and
houses are colour-coded to correspond--but one house in the background
of some shots, in a burnt orange and dark blue stripe, is of
a different texture, canvas rather than breeze-blocks. Dianne
Wiest wears a housedress at one point with a motif of apples--except
that a second glance reveals cores and half-apples mixed in impartially
with the whole fruit. A black dog which passes through the frame
just near the end of the film has had stylised cuts made in the
fur of its haunches, lacquered machicolations that give it a
strange punk presence.
Authority figures in the film, fathers and policemen, are benign,
indulgent, even infantile. Even that Hollywood standby, the mad
inventor played by Vincent Price, is a curiously innocent figure.
His most elaborate device, occupying space equivalent to a small
warehouse, is a cookie-making machine. He's a cross-between Baron
Frankenstein and Betty Crocker. All the parts of the machine
are in some way anthropomorphic, but in caricatural fat or thin
form, the vats tubby and belted in, the cookie-cutters wielded
by dancing emaciated metal shapes like skeletons.
The movies have a minor obsession with the mechanisation of
breakfast--you can follow the theme from Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang through Brazil to the Back
to the Future trilogy--but this machine
glories not in efficiency but its opposite. It celebrates the
disproportion between a device and its product, just as the film
as a whole brings together extremes of design sophistication
and naive feeling.
Topiary, hairdressing and pet styling are not the only arts
that depend on judicious cutting. Every film-maker, or every
film-editor at any rate, is a scissorhands of sorts, and it's
easy to see how a movie brat like Tim Burton--whose own first
film was a cartoon homage to Vincent Price--might identify with
his hero. Perhaps that's why the makers of Edward Scissorhands have been content to create a paradoxical icon of their craft
and haven't bothered to construct a story worthy of him. Winona
Ryder plays Edward's wholesome love interest perfectly adequately,
but hers is the only part of the film where Burton's inventive
quirkiness runs out of steam.
All the same, Edward Scissorhands is a beguiling experience.
The last time an audience saw a character with knives for fingers,
it was Freddie Krueger with his glove made of razor blades in
the Nightmare on Elm Street series. The way in which that character
became a cult figure exemplified one of the most ominous trends
of 1980s cinema. What is remarkable about Edward Scissorhands is how rapidly an audience sated with slashings and slayings
will take this jagged child to its heart.
