If only the cast had a coherent screenplay to fit its characters into in this film based on Augusten Burroughs’ coming-of-age memoir.
By: Bob Brown
If eccentricity is your cup of tea, this brew’s for you. It’s based on Augusten Burroughs’ coming-of-age memoir, which has been on The New York Times’ best sellers list for months. Charles Dickens might have novelized it, were he living in 1970s suburban Massachusetts.
In Burroughs’ world, life is so whacked out that you can’t cry for laughing. Or is it the other way around? And how does one convey this on 116 minutes of celluloid? Hilarious and melancholy go together like lobster and chocolate sauce. The taste of either alone can be delicious, but together, where does the palette focus? The taste buds wander.
That’s the trouble with this story. It strives so earnestly on several levels, yet it’s not funny enough to make up for the lack of a core. The filmmakers did all the right things. All the pieces are there. But the package does not fully satisfy.
Writer/director Ryan Murphy (creator of TV’s Nip/Tuck) embraced this project so empathetically. Perhaps he failed to maintain enough artistic distance to control impulses. At least that’s one guess as to why this otherwise promising film falls flat.
Murphy and his entire cast worked very closely with Burroughs to re-create the story for film, getting into the author’s mind, tweaking things here and there. It’s a sprawling tale, to be sure, with two classically dysfunctional families Burroughs’ and that of his mother Deirdre’s psychiatrist, Dr. Finch (Scottish actor Brian Cox), to whom Deirdre (Annette Bening) bequeaths her son.
Young Augusten (Joseph Cross) is his mother’s boy, but his distant alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) pays him little attention and winds up in boozy brawls with Mom. Counseling with the strange Dr. Finch does nothing to repair the broken marriage. So intense are the doctor’s sessions that he maintains a "masturbatorium" just off the main office, where he can release the tensions of a busy day. "I’m a human being," he explains to patients.
The soon-single Deirdre becomes psychologically and pharmacologically a creature of the well-meaning, bizarre psychiatrist. Ensconced in a local motel with a supply of tranquilizers, Deirdre entrusts Augusten to the care of the Finches.
The Finch house is a pink-porticoed mansion with a trash-strewn, flamingo-dotted front lawn. It is a temple to weirdness. Through its front door is a wonderland where filthy kitchens and cluttered attics have gone to die. Production designer Richard Sherman listened to Burroughs’ description, then created a version which Burroughs himself proclaimed "shockingly familiar."
The Finch family fits the surroundings: the oversexed teenager Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood); her dreamy sister Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is Papa’s favorite; and their mousy mother, Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), whose preferred snack is Kibbles for cats, which she munches while watching the soap opera Dark Shadows.
There is also the family feline, Freud, who runs out of his ninth life after Hope forces him to live for a week under a plastic laundry hamper. And out in the shed lives Neil (Joseph Fiennes), a sometime patient who is, or is not, Finch’s adopted son, but who certainly is a gay pedophile. He initiates Augusten into the rigors of sex.
Augusten loses his natural family but gains the Finch household. It’s a crucible that shapes his sense of himself and fortifies his survival skills. How could it not? He never knows when he’ll get back with his mother, who is mostly in a drug haze, and he must roll with the continual crises that are erupting in the Finch household. IRS agents are threatening to seize the house. And Dr. Finch has found a miraculous revelation in the downstairs toilet.
The story lacks an arc that would build the mad rambling events to a crisis. The random episodic narrative induces boredom if not annoyance. Where is all this going?
The two characters who develop and, in some sense, grow are Augusten and Deirdre, a would-be poetess who weathers breakdowns and drug-dependencies. Mostly she is not available for Augusten. His surrogate mother becomes Agnes, who finds in him the good boy she never had. "You’re the best son any mother could have," she tells him, in a crucial scene.
The cast is marvelous for their part. Particularly fine are Cox as the mad but lovable Dr. Finch, and Clayburgh as his spacey, long-suffering wife. Although he has a small part, Fiennes is intense and riveting. In one scene, where he reads an angry poem, viewers might jump.
If only the cast had a coherent screenplay to fit its characters into. The music selections, straight out of the ’70s, are period correct, but not really matched to what’s happening on screen. They just seem to be there to remind you of what era it is.
This is a movie about a harrowing childhood that its author had to endure. Viewers may feel they’re having to endure it too. Stay for the credits to see what happened to all the characters in the end if you haven’t left the theater already.
Rated R for strong language and elements of sexuality, violence and substance abuse.

