Edward Scissorhands is an easy target in 2014, because we have the benefit of knowing that Tim Burton would lose all his magic, Johnny Depp would become box office poison, Alan Arkin would turn into a grumpy old man, etc. Besides, this is a movie that asks us to believe that a mysterious inventor not only created a working human being, but did so without giving it hands until the last minute (Never put off until tomorrow...). We watch the Avon lady knocking on the door of that enormous castle at the top of the mountain at the end of Main Street, and wonder why she doesn't just try another neighborhood. And by the time the movie reaches its climax, the questions really start springing up.
Are cops really that stupid?
Who's going to clean up that mess?
Where'd he get all those huge blocks of ice?
Yes, this is an absurd movie, but it's far more absurd to even attempt approaching it rationally. Burton's best work was done crafting fairy tales for an audience that was largely ill-equipped to accept them. Though viewers and time have been kind to Edward, many critics at the time of release were downright cruel to the picture. It's no wonder that Burton became the champion of certain communities of young people who considered themselves society outcasts and were ready to embrace anyone who could put their feelings on film. What these kids seemed to miss was that Burton was discouraging a lifestyle of separation. In fact, all of his movies follow the theme that no good can come from solitude.
Symbolically, Edward is the troubled child, raised by parents with good intentions and little understanding. He is socially inept because of his long period of isolation up in that castle after the death of his "father," the inventor. The Avon lady feels genuinely bad for him and "adopts" him into her family, but does a poor job of actually giving him an idea of how to adjust to his new life. A great example of this is the scene during a family dinner, where Edward has great difficulty eating anything with his scissorhands and the family does absolutely nothing to help him. They provide the food and think that's enough. And when Edward really starts acting out towards the end, they at first essentially tell him, "Stop that!" without helping him understand what he did wrong to begin with, and eventually tell him to get out.
This leads to the film's ridiculous ending that is the real test of how accepting of Burton's fantasy we really are. Once you've come to terms with Edward's condition and the film's goofy style, nothing before the last fifteen minutes or so is actually very illogical at all. It is only the finale that throws all narrative caution to the wind and even teeters on the line of bad writing. But to question the common sense of the events closing the movie would require questioning the whole movie, which goes back to the fairy tale argument. If this is Burton's precise vision, to recreate the blind whimsy of childhood stories in a more adult setting, how can we judge it by standards of reality?
In this sense, Tim Burton and Caroline Thompson's screenplay is critic-proof because any notable flaw was intentional and any argument against the movie can just as easily be turned around for it. Because the story is so deliberately broad, a critique has to be based entirely on emotional impact; whether or not you gave in or kept your distance.
Take, for instance, the women of the neighborhood who get so much screentime. They're all one-note side characters that mostly just fluff out the story without really building it. There's the large, harsh woman who always has curlers in her hair, the aging housewife who shamelessly flirts with Edward, the creepy Christian who insists he's an abomination, and so on. One could complain about the sexist stereotypes of these women, though their husbands are presented in an equally bad light, and one could demand more well-rounded personalities, which would deprive the movie of some essential irony. The ladies serve their purpose just as they are: to befreind Edward for selfish reasons and turn on him within seconds. We laugh at them and hate them, and need nothing else from them.
Even as flimsy as the characters are, a truly fun cast was assembled, a cast that seemed to understand the humor and borderline campiness of the movie without abandoning its somber tone. Everyone remembers Johnny Depp, looking like Marilyn Manson and acting like a lost puppy, and Winona Ryder, who is fine but would go on to better things, but I especially like the parents. Alan Arkin wasn't yet the Alan Arkin he now plays in every role, and I love his character's impassionate fatherly advice that does nobody any good. Dianne Wiest was already being typecast as the uncool mom (The Lost Boys, Parenthood), but nobody did it better, and she is always able to portray excessive naivete while still remaining likeable. Also interesting is seeing Anthony Michael Hall play a convincing tough guy just a few years after he was the wimpy nerd in The Breakfast Club, and Vincent Price has a cameo as the inventor, which was his last film role.
On a technical level, the film is still a creative marvel. Stefan Czapsky did the photography, which is effectively simple, creating wonder by merely soaking in the often weird images. The production design was by Bo Welch, who had done Burton's even weirder Beetlejuice, and who provides a fantastic cobwebbed mansion for Edward's home and a perfect eyesore for the typical American community (Even the town's middle school looks like an Easter egg gone wrong.). Academy Award nominations went to makeup artist Ve Neill who gave Depp all those scars, and to Stan Winston who created the scissorhands themselves, which really did work so well that they are like an extension of Depp's performance.
Danny Elfman has cited his score for the film, which is alternately sad and silly, as the favorite of his compositions, and it's easy to understand why. It is a fittingly haunting piece of music that accents the mood of the movie perfectly, while also standing tall outside of it. Tim Burton has also stated that this is the favorite of his features, also understandable. Besides being a very personal project several years in the making, Burton truly hit a personal peak at this moment in-between the comic-book fantasy worlds of Beetlejuice and Batman and the increasingly less magical effects spectacles of his later career. Though he would have a few other shining moments (The Nightmare before Christmas and Sweeney Todd among them), he would never again have as great and exciting an acheivement as Edward Scissorhands.
But good technical work and wacky characters don't make a good movie alone, especially a movie with as frothy a story as this one. So it is not the hands themselves that has allowed Edward to survive 24 years, but what the hands represent. This is a very imaginative movie, but there have been many movies overflowing with imagination that didn't have the heart to make us care. Accompanying every ridiculous moment of Edward Scissorhands is Tim Burton's sincere belief in his project, the love of creation and storytelling that every great filmmaker brings to the screen. And anyone who can see that love through the "flaws" will find the real magic of the film. This is the reason the movie is critic-proof, and why we keep returning to it instead of laughing it off the screen.
No comments:
Post a Comment