When I first heard about this movie, I wasn't really into the premise. Sure, a movie based on the memoir by the author who lived a unique and estranged life would call the attention of anybody. Nevertheless, when it comes to movies, I can be a picky bastard.
However, after a couple months of having heard about it, I finally decided to give the movie a try. And let me tell you, this movie made me feel a roller coaster of emotions I wasn't ready for.
The movie follows the peculiar life of Augusten Burroughs. Since a kid, he wanted to be a poet like his mother. He admired her literary work. He resonated more with her than he did with his father. But his life was nowhere near perfect. His mother suffered from mental health; his father was an alcoholic. They both argued constantly, and Augusten's mother used to cry saying that her husband wanted to kill her. He was going to kill her someday, she kept saying to Augusten.
However, life didn't get better for anybody once they meet Dr. Finch, a psychiatrist with his own sort of shadows ruling in his head. He began to overlook Augusten's mother as her therapist, only to later become Augusten's legal guardian because his mother thought it would be best for them. After this moment, Augusten's life took a pivotal point he wasn't really happy with.
Despite the depth of the story and the perfectly molded characters, this movie shows some of the reality that we are afraid to accept in life.
We think that we are the centers of our world; our problems matter more than others. We tend to look past others and simply think that life is good for them.
Each person is suffering a battle of their own with demons. Mental health isn't that romanticized bullshit we often see in movies. Mental health dives deeper than being crazy and being high off your head because of the meds. Mental health doesn't just affect the host—it affects those around the host too. Mental health is more than we know, and even the “sanest" of people share their own dark secrets.
“Running With Scissors" is a metaphor that shows the true meaning of life. We are told that doing such a thing is unsafe. Yet, we are running with scissors every day of our life; we just don't know it until we fall and cut ourselves. Life is a dangerous run, and we're rarely aware of the dangers of it. We live carefree because life is life. But we realize that life is more than life when we fall and cut ourselves with that blade we had thought of as dull.