'SCISSORHANDS' RISES SEVERAL CUTS ABOVE USUAL HOLIDAY FARE

By David Elliott

From The San Diego Union-Tribune, 12.14.1990

The hero of Edward Scissorhands has long, slicing cutlery for hands. It is a sign of film creator Tim Burton's real class that he makes us shiver a bit while smiling, without making us think of brutes like Freddy Krueger.

Played by Johnny Depp with flying punk hair and the sweet, bewildered face of a Pierrot who is also a sort of Frankenstein, Edward is created by a wizened wizard (Vincent Price). He dies before giving the boy more human hands. Ed is stuck with shears, and his face is scarred from poking himself (typical of the film, the scars are virtual beauty marks).

Orphaned Ed lives on alone, in the Gothic mansion that crowns the fantastic hill above a suburban tract. He is rescued by Peg Boggs, an Avon Lady acted by Dianne Wiest with her purest nectar of namby-pambiness--in her pillbox hat, and smile screwed on like a Christmas bulb, Wiest is St. Avon, the most twit-brained dearie of a saleswoman we'll ever meet.

"Let me give you an astringent," Peg chimes to Ed, looking at his scarred face, barely bothered by his hands. She's eager to give him the Avon lift. Soon she has Ed at home, in one of the gaily colored little houses that seem to hang in suburban suspension under pillowy clouds, in a time warp that's closer to the '50s than the '90s.

Peg's circle of housewives are atwitter over Ed, her son thinks the hands are "cool," and her husband isn't worried at all (Alan Arkin plays him with full satirical subtlety, as a man so cozy with mediocrity that it enshrines him). The teen daughter (Winona Ryder) is first shocked by Ed, yet she has princess vision--she peers into his hurt, lovable soul, and yearns for enclosure within his metal hands.

Tim Burton and his great team (composer Danny Elfman, designer Bo Welch, effects master Stan Winston, photographer Stefan Czapsky) achieve a magic of blithe weirdness. It is clear, after Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman, that Burton is a cookie-mold visionary, with a take on American life midway between Steven Spielberg and David Lynch (not as sticky as the first nor as icky as the second).

Edward, though sadly clumsy at the dinner table, slices the foliage of the neighborhood into amazing topiary animals. His snip-snip artistry thrills Peg and her pals when Edward does their hair--Peg moves from a Jackie K. bouffant to a Laurie Anderson chop-job--and as their hair falls to his inspiration, they achieve erotic radiance, like the women coiffed and bedded by Warren Beatty in Shampoo.

Having first drawn Edward in high school, Burton (who has Edward's pallor and black, wild hair) is obviously venting old tensions, having been a goofy outsider in a square world. But he doesn't jeer or sneer, doesn't seek delayed revenge now that he has hit the big time.

Instead, he snips away airily, like Edward working over a poodle. The movie has spellbound moments when the camera gazes upon the box-housed suburb, made special by Edward's topiary art, with something like interplanetary love.

One crude touch is the daughter's boyfriend, a lout played by Anthony Michael Hall. Though he will never again be the funny boy of Sixteen Candles, Hall has the talent to have made this kid interesting, if the script had allowed. It would have given the story added weight if Hall had shown him as awed and scared by Edward, not just offended.

Edward Scissorhands is best at comical moments. The use of Tom Jones songs, for example, and a TV talk show hosted by John Davidson, at which the studio audience claps merrily at every darling thought. And there is twinkling fondness in Burton's use of old Vincent Price, who was the subject of Burton's short film Vincent.

A drawback is that the fairy-tale romance of pale Edward and his blond princess is pretty anemic, cut from storybook formula, despite the fervor of Depp and Ryder (who are romancing in real life). And the ending's visual charm slips a little short of emotional fullness; some viewers may wish for more of an upper.

Those are minor chords of letdown in a movie that marches to its own daffy drummer. Like The Little Shop of Horrors four years ago, Edward Scissorhands is a holiday gift with more than good wrapping.