BURTON'S OFF-KILTER SCISSORHANDS A FANTASTIC SLICE OF
SUBURBAN LIFE
By Catherine Dunphy
From The Toronto Star, December 14, 1990
Director Tim Burton's latest creation has none of Beetlejuice's
gleeful depravity or Batman's dark lethargy but enough quirky
charm to win over anyone who loved one or the other of his signature
movies.
Edward Scissorhands, the movie, is, for the most part, gentle
and endearing. So is Edward Scissorhands, the hero. As Johnny
("21 Jump Street") Depp plays him, Edward is a lovable
original with the big brown eyes of a wounded deer.
The creation of a mad scientist (Vincent Price, of course) who
lives in crumbling gothic splendor high on a hill, Edward has
the walk of a rusty but beloved mechanical toy and the guileless
eyes of a newborn - along with the whiteface of a Samurai warrior,
studded leather gear of a punk and hands that are 12-inch shafts
of metal.
No ordinary hero; no ordinary movie.
It's Burton's off-kilter vision of what happens when a fantasy
meets real life in a vacuous, pastel California suburbia bound
by rites - barbecues, the telephone chain, the 8 a.m. cavalcade
of office-bound cars.
It is as phony as the plastic Christmas decorations on every
bungalow.
But it is deft, funny (until the end, anyway) and never meanspirited.
Among all the artifice and artificiality, Edward is the only
character who's an obvious creation and not real.
He's also the only one who can achieve - or represent - innocence.
Nevertheless, he is still cool, hip (like, he does wear black
leather and he is an artist) the perfect foil to point out the
foibles of adults.
He has all the makings to be the teen set's newest cult hero.
Either that or they might petition that Edward be grafted on
to any new version of the Rocky Horror Show.
Edward is doing just fine living alone, clipping furiously in
the accepted manner of all mad artists, when a very determined
Avon Lady finds him and brings him home to her blue corner house
in the suburb at the foot of the hill.
Dianne Wiest could have played Peg Boggs for belly laughs. Fortunately,
she opted for accuracy and settled for amiable.
The cosmetic saleslady who tries so hard to find the right mixture
to camouflage Edward's scars is no comic buffoon. She has a big
heart to go with her blind spot for Edward, and the chain reaction
he causes.
Her bland husband, Bill (Alan Arkin playing Father Knows Best
minus only the cardigan), shows no surprise at the pale-faced,
tangle-haired guest at their dinner table and, to his credit,
makes banal but accepting conversation as Edward tries to eat
green peas with his unwieldy equipment.
Teenage daughter Kim (a wide-eyed Winona Ryder) is watchful,
her boyfriend (a tense, short-fused Anthony Michael Hall) downright
hostile.
Not so the neighbors. The women tumble out of their pastel houses
and over each other to welcome and win over Edward.
Kathy Baker is flamboyantly funny as Joyce Monroe, the suburbanite
with three-inch talons, tight capris and more than her quota
of cleavage.
She and the others are thrilled when Edward shapes their hair,
trims their poodles, creates fantastical sculptures where ungainly
bushes once grew.
Maybe middle America is not so middling after all. But will
it accept Edward as more than a show dog, a young, albeit attractive,
freak?
Acceptance and happily-everafter don't belong in Burton's movies.
He drops the sweetness, light and joy and darkens the action
in a climactic, jarringly violent scene that seems designed to
wound everyone watching who believed in - and were rooting for
- Edward Scissorhands.
But the watchword is wary, not bleak. Burton has created a fantasy,
his own fantasy. It has to do with real life and make believe
and the two colliding.
And neither self-destructing.
In Edward Scissorhands it becomes clear that this is one fantasy
Burton still believes in.
