'SCISSORHANDS' IS A SHEAR DELIGHT

By Jay Carr

From The Boston Globe, 12.14.1990, City Edition

Most teen-agers fear they're weird. Bright teen-agers are convinced they're weird. Tim Burton, as a teen-ager growing up in Burbank, was bright. In his first animated short, Vincent, he portrayed himself as a pale lurker with bags under his eyes, watching old Vincent Price movies instead of playing outside with the other kids. Edward Scissorhands, his soulful and supercharged new fairy-tale extravaganza, is a big-budget Vincent, right down to the hiring of the real Vincent Price to play the mad scientist who lives in a gloomy mountaintop mansion and dies before he can give his android named Edward a pair of hands instead of the sharp shears that jut from his wrists. With his black leather duds and doom-laden eyes, Johnny Depp's sensitive but potentially lethal Edward suggests a cross between Jimmy Dean and Freddy Krueger.

Edward Scissorhands is Burton's most personal film, stuffed with psychic autobiography and the kind of pop iconography that made his Beetlejuice and Pee-wee's Big Adventure such delights. You don't need dazzling interpretive skills to recognize Burton's self-portrait in Depp's android who can't help slashing himself every time he feels an itch. Coexisting with his scarred, chalk-white face and black fright wig is a manner so delicate that it's his most otherworldly quality. When the neighborhood Avon lady, played at just the right pitch of good-hearted twitter by Dianne Wiest, takes him home, you know there's trouble ahead, especially after the nosy neighbors' booming expressions of instant friendship.

One of the joys of Edward Scissorhands is the way Burton bumps the pastel-perfect tract houses against the Gothic mountaintop castle, having them share the same suburban cul de sac. He's always had a way of boosting pop art into surrealism, and he does it again here, especially when he sets Edward to winning friends by generously donating his skills after he's revealed as a whiz at topiary hedge-trimming, ice sculpture and hair styling. Kathy Baker, as the neighborhood sexpot in her toreador pants and tight-fitting tops, is funny as the one who takes the lead in finding him erotic. But he's no aggressor, sexual or otherwise. Only when he's furiously trimming away does he let anything like aggression show. The rest of the time, he softly implodes and dreams of Wiest's teen queen Valley Girl daughter, played by Winona Ryder in a copper-colored wig.

Burton's images and iconography are far more bountiful than his script, in fact. When Wiest dresses up in her Kennedy-era lavender waffle piquet suit with matching pillbox hat, further comment on her would be redundant. When we see the pain in Edward's eyes, he doesn't need speeches about how he feels. But the film does need a narrative drive that the script doesn't provide. Burton is great at putting highly charged visual worlds onscreen but is markedly less skilled at developing the characters who live in them. Here, they largely stay emblematic, bogging down once Burton puts them in place. And the ending is miscalculated, introducing a kind of violence for which we haven't been adequately prepared.

Still, Edward Scissorhands is a visually potent parable of teen-age alienation, even if Burton can't find the kind of follow-through that would have made it really take off. He does bring satirical snap to the idea of superficial American affability--his film isn't just another series of Kodachromes from the '60s. Sure as you can't eat peas with a huge pair of shears, you can't mix soulfulness and subdivisions. It's not an original insight, but in Burton's case it's at least heartfelt. In the end, when Ryder's character finally sees the light, Edward Scissorhands plays like Vincent and Theo for mall kids. What with Cry-Baby, Pump Up the Volume and now the flawed but visually energized Edward Scissorhands, it's been a good year for teen outsider movies.