CUTTING UP WITH EDDIE

Jan. 18, 1991

In Hollywood, there’s a popular euphemism for saying that someone doesn’t like a script or a movie. They don’t say, “I don’t like it.” They say, “I’m sorry I just didn’t get it.” The former, you see, implies some sort of failure on the part of the movie maker. But the latter implies a failure on the part of the viewer. As in, “If I were only a smarter or more perceptive person, I would have understood what you, in your genius, were doing.” It’s all polite nonsense, of course. They just didn’t like it, period.

So I read my local newspaper’s review of Edward Scissorhands, and the reviewer hated it. He made that quite clear. He flat out didn’t like it. The basic thrust of the review was, “Here’s a guy with scissors on his hands, and what does he spend the movie doing? Making sculptures out of bushes and ice. How stupid.” He didn’t make the film sound remotely appealing.

Then James Fry, whose opinion I respect (how can you not respect someone whose mascot is the Robot Monster?) said that Edward was an absolutely beautiful, touching, wonderful film and that I had to run right out and see it. So I ran right out and saw it.

Turns out James was right. If you have not yet seen Edward Scissorhands, then you must. Here is a film that is more visually staggering than Burton’s previous effort, Batman, because, rather than millions of dollars being spent on creating Gotham (when, if you wanted a gritty, dirty city, you could easily have filmed in Manhattan at night and gotten much better effects), Edward creates a world that could only exist in films.

Imagine, if you will, a suburban never-never land. A dazzling array of tract houses, differing from each other only in their choice of cotton-candy pastel colorings. And at the end of the street of the development there just so happens to be this massive, overgrown castle on a mountain where a mad scientist (played by Vincent Price) lives. Throughout the film, no one ever comments on this. No one ever complains about the creepy house. It’s simply accepted, and the acceptance adds to the discordance.

From this house comes Edward (played to perfection by Johnny Depp), an unliving being created from a robot skeleton by Price, who dies before he can finish his creation and attach hands. Ghastly white with puckered lips and a face scarred from accidentally touching it with his “fingers,” Edward views this bizarre world through the eyes of an innocent. And he begins to create sculptures from the local bushes.

It is at this point that I began to understand the reviewer’s problem. It was a reverse on the old Hollywood bit. Instead of not liking a film but simply claiming they “didn’t get it,” here was a reviewer who clearly didn’t get it but instead stridently stated that he didn’t like it.

The young son of the Avon lady who takes Edward in comments several times how one karate chop from Edward’s hands could send someone’s head flying. That’s obviously what the reviewer wanted to see. If Edward had patrolled the city at night, looking for crime, that would have been fine. Or if it had been a film in the vein of Nightmare on Elm Street, that would have been even better.

Edward Scissorhands is not a film about a guy with blades on his wrists who wastes two hours of screen time making sculptures. It’s about an artistic soul trapped in a hideous body, whose only means of self expression– his blessing– doubles as his curse. The blades help him carve beauty, but he can’t touch beauty. Backed up by Danny Elfman’s mournful score, it’s a wonderful film.

I would not advise taking small children to it, which I saw a number of people doing. My 9-year-old handled it just fine, although she was in tears by the end because “it’s so sad.” My 5-year-old, though, would have seen Edward as terrifying, not sympathetic, and would not have liked it at all. I don’t mind films that scare kids (