STICKS WITH YOU

REVIEWED - RUNNING WITH SCISSORS:HEAVEN spare us from another book in which a damaged adult details the childhood traumas that condemned him or her to endure life as a publishing sensation. Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors - neurotic mother; abusive psychiatrist; dangerous platform shoes - was such an entity, but it has here been transformed into something a tad more entertaining than we might have feared.

It seems unlikely that the world Burroughs moved through looked overmuch like that of Ryan Murphy's amusing, if disordered, film. The 1970s decor has been heightened to terrifyingly groovy effect.

Annette Bening, never averse to wearing pointy hats or straddling broomsticks, makes a vainglorious demon of the hero's troubled mother. When Augusten is forced to move in with his mother's messianic analyst (a crafty, insidious Brian Cox), the picture takes its most extreme turn. The doctor's house, all looming balconies and crumbling staircases, is a suitable environment for the maniacs and depressives who live within. Here we meet an icy Gwyneth Paltrow, reprising her performance in The Royal Tenenbaums, as an older daughter who, at one stage, appears to turn a recently deceased cat into stew. Jill Clayburgh, that near-forgotten face of the 1970s, turns up as the catatonic mother.

And, my, what larks they have. "This is my masterbatorium!" Cox bellows at Paltrow, after discovering her in an alcove where a box of tissues sits beneath photographs of Golda Meir and Queen Elizabeth.

For much of its duration, Running with Scissors feels more like an episode of The Addams Family than a searing treatment of childhood abuse. As such (though Bening's failed poet is clearly a tragic figure) it presents an unexpectedly droll aspect to the viewer. The tendency to punctuate every plot reversal with a track from K-Tel's Boffo Smashes of 1979 is regrettable, but the film never quite passes beyond arch into irritating.

If nothing else, Running with Scissors may be of use as a propaganda tool for social conservatives. The supposed liberal excesses of the 1960s are seen to cause nothing but misery for young Augusten, who, before heading off to be gay in Manhattan, eventually admits he would prefer order and boundaries to domestic anarchy.

A sociological Reefer Madness for the new century. Who'd have thought it?