SOFT-HEARTED FAIRY TALE OF AN OUTSIDER

By Michael Wilmington

From The Los Angeles Times, 12.14.1990, San Diego County Edition

"Edward Scissorhands has a lot to do with growing up in Burbank. . . . Not literal translations, actual people. But there are memories."--Tim Burton

His face is pale, covered with cuts and scars, dominated by yearning eyes and a black, sticky tangle of hair. His manner is wary but sweetly considerate, belying the punkish black leather he wears under his everyday garb. He could be an ordinary boy--except for one thing. Springing from his wrists are 10-inch razor-sharp metal blades that slice, zip and whoosh through the air with hedge-trimming deftness and Ninja ferocity.

He's Edward Scissorhands and, as Tim Burton dreams him and actor Johnny Depp plays him, he's perhaps the most original movie fantasy creation of the year: an icon of tenderness and artistic alienation that clings, stickum-like, to your mind's eye and the softest, most woundable parts of your mass-culture heart.

Scissorhands is not as frenetic and juicy as previous Burton movies, like Beetlejuice or Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Occasionally, there is something a little distant and dry about it. But it's just as daffy and inventive: a modern fairy tale about a bewildered young manufactured boy, complete except for makeshift hands, pulled from a Gothic horror-house into the screamingly pastel candyland of modern suburbia.

It's part Portrait of the Artist as a Young Frankenstein, part relentless satire of Burton's birthplace, Burbank. And it's also part Dr. Seuss-Edward Gorey allegory about how middle-class America has educated and programmed itself out of appreciating wonder.

Burton, digging into his psyche with a ruthlessness that mass-audience movie makers usually avoid, has fashioned Edward out of the adolescent fears and longings that usually only emerge, bent out of shape, in confessional novels and bits of youth-rebel movies. And Depp has done something marvelous with the part. Summoning up a silent-movie grace and abandon, he has converted himself almost wholly into a figure of the imagination, translated the script's emotions with such transparency that it is the freak who seems real and all the human denizens of the comical flatland suburbia below who seem false or grotesque.

As Burton remembers and imagines them, these suburbanites are a gaggle of Bermuda-shorted, back-slapping dads and chattering moms, salted with bigots and religious fanatics. In this conformist subdivision (we never learn its name but the license plates all read "Midland"), the favorite sport is telephone gossip, the snap response to any disturbing new event is to hold a barbecue. There, newcomer Edward proves handy for chopping salads or working as a human shish kebab--in between his other local gigs as topiary artist, dog barber and hair stylist.

Burton's satire of middle-brow America, the milieu in which he grew up, is devastating but never nasty. The citizenry seems to have grooved into a sapped conformity: glaze-eyed, glib Bill Boggs (Alan Arkin), patriarch of the family that hosts Edward, burbles out platitudes as if he'd been programmed by a cult based on TV family sitcoms. The youngsters are mean-rebellious, impatient for more money, good times.

The two dominant figures are marvelous, spine-tinglingly funny caricatures by Dianne Wiest and Kathy Baker. Seraphic Peg Boggs (Wiest) is a cosmetics lady whose face lights up like a Christmas tree when she finds someone to help and who brightly chirps "Avon calling!" as she enters Edward's dank and shadowy mansion. And hot-pants Louise (Baker) is an auburn-haired virago of bottomless innuendo.

Against all this, Burton and novelist-screenwriter Caroline Thompson make Edward a tamed Prometheus, the artist in chains. His almost slavish, rapt adoration of Peg's cheerleader daughter Kim (Winona Ryder), girlfriend of the villainous Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), is an agonized manifestation of the adolescent outsider's desire to be accepted. His blade-fingers are the artist's symbol. He can carve up wonders with them, but they also cut him up, make him a freak. He can't make love without hurting, can't even touch or sleep on a water-bed without springing leaks in every direction.

This is the most deeply personal thing Burton has done since his 1982 debut cartoon, Vincent, and, after a mass-audience monster like Batman, perhaps that made him hedge a little. I admired Edward, but I didn't find any magic in what should have been its most magical moment: Winona Ryder whirling in a drizzle of shimmering flakes, as Edward vibrantly carves out an ice-angel. And the lack of chemistry between Ryder and Hall damages the sequences where Edward supposedly goes crazy with jealousy.

But these are quibbles. The whole film has a tender underlining and a marvelous fun-house look and pace. There are lots of laughs, tears and the most hilarious hedges and hair styles in many a moon. There's Vincent Price, like some benignly demonic paterfamilias, and another witty, rich score by Danny Elfman, whose sensibility connects as perfectly with Burton as Bernard Herrmann's did with Alfred Hitchcock.

There's the whir of Depp's fingers, trimming a poodle, picking a lock. There's Wiest, Arkin and Baker, good as they can possibly be. And there's a little, sweet-sad moment when Edward, outcast of outcasts, sits on a curb by a waiting sheep dog and gently snips hair out of the dog's eyes. Gentleness is a nice quality to have back in movies. Along with some fairy-tale pain, longing and hilarity, Edward Scissorhands (rated PG-13 for language and violence) has it.