Tivoli Theatre Presents – After Hours Film Society – Edward Scissorhands

Film Review: Tim Burton’s ‘Edward Scissorhands’
Reviewed by Dave Kehr
Chicago TribunePublished: Dec 14, 1990 at 12:00 am

Director Tim Burton has designed his strange, funny and powerfully moving ”Edward Scissorhands” as a myth or a fairy tale. The narrative is framed as a grandmother`s extended response to a child who asks, ”Why does it snow?”-and yet the film has the emotional core of something very real, very personal and very painful.

Burton, who achieved a cult following with ”Pee-wee`s Big Adventure” and ”Beetlejuice” and vast commercial success with ”Batman,” again puts forward a sulky, isolated central character, who lives in self-protective withdrawal until circumstances force him out into the world.

Edward is Johnny Depp, in a complicated black leather getup and great black circles around his eyes that turn him into a silent-movie figure-part Chaplin, part Cesar the Somnambulist from ”The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” He is a mechanical man, pieced together from rusty gears and wheezing bellows by a kindly gentleman he knows only as the Inventor (Vincent Price, incredibly ancient, fragile and, as Burton photographs him, beautiful).
The film opens much as ”Beetlejuice” does, with the camera flying over a model village, a ravishing, lyrical sequence that also gives us the visual and metaphorical layout of the film. We see a model suburban community, each house painted a different Crayola color, an image of a too-perfect order and conformity that is suddenly broken by the unlikely appearance, at the end of a courtyard, by a craggy mountain topped by an immense, crumbling gothic castle. This is Edward`s home, where he is found, frightened and huddled in a corner, by an inquisitive and compassionate Avon Lady, Peg Boggs (Dianne Wiest). The boy stirs her pity, the more so when she sees his hands-a tangle of knife- and scissor-blades. The Inventor has died, leaving Edward uncompleted and alone.

Peg brings Edward down to her tidy ranch house below (the extraordinary production design, by Bo Welch, manages to parody a `50s, populuxe decor without itself succumbing to kitsch), where she tries to make him part of her model family-Dad Alan Arkin, decent and monumentally distracted, young son Kevin (Robert Oliveri), who proudly displays Edward at his school`s show-and- tell, and well-scrubbed teenage daughter Kim (Winona Ryder, almost unrecognizable as a strawberry blond), who of course finds Edward infinitely weird and wholly repellent.

As the shy, uncertain Edward struggles tragically to find a place in this painfully, even hysterically normal world, the film becomes a fable of growing up different. It could be any difference, though the film, through association and suggestion, makes of Edward`s hands an image of homosexuality.

Unable to touch without wounding or inspiring horror, Edward channels his frustrated feelings into creativity; he discovers in stages that those scissorhands work wonders in trimming hedges, poodles and women`s hair. He becomes the only kind of artist that a shopping mall culture can accommodate-a hairdresser.

Edward`s difference at first makes him a success (there isn`t a tree, dog or matron within the film`s visual range that Edward hasn`t startlingly reshaped) but eventually calls down suspicion and resentment. He spurns the sexual advances of one of the local ladies (Kathy Baker, in a grotesque performance that leaves the film open to some legitimate charges of misogyny), and his crush on the beautiful, unattainable Kim calls down the anger of her boyfriend (Anthony Michael Hall, reborn as a perfect teen thug), who frames Edward for a burglary.

Now suddenly the personification of evil, Edward must be driven from the town, back to his castle. But as he loses the sympathy of the townspeople, he gains the affections of Kim, who has discovered his helplessness and sensitivity.

Burton uses the extreme stylization of ”Edward Scissorhands”-a stylization both of imagery and character-to turn what might have been hopelessly maudlin, self-pitying material into something stirring and timeless. Edward`s plight has just enough of the grain of the real-in his agony and awkwardness-to be emotionally involving, and just enough abstraction to expand the issue of tolerance and compassion beyond a single, melodramatic case. The direction has a delicate, walking-on-eggs feeling; through poise and balance it avoids the obvious dangers.

Like David Lynch in ”Wild at Heart,” though to very different ends, Burton has found a way to move through camp to emotional authenticity, to communicate-through a concentration of style and an innocence of regard-a depth and sincerity of feeling that his deliberately (and often, comically) flat characters could not summon on their own.

”Edward Scissorhands” suggests a way out of the impasse of insincerity and cynical manipulation in which American film now finds itself. Burton may not believe in the story he tells, but he believes in the values that lie behind it and the feelings they can stir.

”EDWARD SCISSORHANDS”
***1/2

Directed by Tim Burton; written by Burton and Caroline Thompson; photographed by Stefan Czapsky; production designed by Bo Welch; edited by Richard Halsey; music by Danny Elfman; produced by Denise Di Novi and Burton. A Twentieth Century Fox release. Running time: 1:45. MPAA rating: PG-13.

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