As a bestseller, Augusten
Burroughs' quirky memoir Running With Scissors probably would have made it to the
screen even if Noah Baumbach's The Squid And The Whale hadn't been an Oscar-nominated
critical hit, but it might have been a far different film. Scissors is packed with the kind of
miserablist youth horrors that are Todd Solondz's stock in trade–abusive parents, early sexual
trauma, abandonment, extreme emotional isolation–but where Solondz would
suffuse them with weighty dread, Nip/Tuck director-producer Ryan Murphy and his cast present
them with a light comic touch similar to Baumbach's style. Scissors is full of horrible people doing
horrible things, but they go to such unlikely extremes that it's impossible to
hate them or get bogged down in their distress; schadenfreude may rear its ugly
head, but authentic sadness rarely does.
