Honing her edge
"WAS it powerful?" Annette Bening's Deirdre Burroughs character in "Running With Scissors" asks her young and slightly baffled son after a risibly overdramatized but somehow elegant reading of one of her poems. "Was it emotionally charged?"
For anyone who's watched the best of Bening's performances over her 20-year film career dating to 1988, the answer is almost inevitably yes. Her irresistibly amoral vixen in "The Grifters," going-slowly-mad housewife in "American Beauty," narcissistic London stage star in "Being Julia" and now her portrayal of Deirdre Burroughs' "bipolar, borderline psychotic, bisexual," in the words of director Ryan Murphy, are the highlights of a successful skein of a career. It's a measure of the respect accorded Bening (who was nominated for a best actress Oscar in 1991, 2000 and 2005 for, respectively, "Grifters," "American Beauty" and "Julia") that she chalked up a Golden Globe nomination for her "Running With Scissors" performance despite the film's generally anemic reviews.
That poetry-reciting scene -- set in 1972 in the Massachusetts home memorialized, controversially, by author Augusten Burroughs in his bestselling funny-sad 2002 memoir that inspired the namesake film -- marked the one shooting day Bening allowed her four children to visit the set, to see her in what Bening calls "a kind of Jane Fonda shag haircut." One minute she was oozing charm to a child actor and the next she was Deirdre, a character in the grip of mental illness who's impelled into a self-obsessed spiral. As a result, she parts with her unsympathetic husband (Alec Baldwin) and gives the care of her son (Joseph Cross) over to an eccentric psychiatrist (Brian Cox) and his rather bizarre family (Evan Rachel Wood, Gwyneth Paltrow and household lodger Joseph Fiennes).
Bening knew from her first reading of the script the fundamental truth of the role: "Deirdre is a survivor, which is I think a very important aspect of her particular character. She's somebody who always managed to persevere -- and at the cost, obviously, of other people."
The actress would indeed walk a very particular line in her portrayal, as evidenced by the fact that the reading scene has her reciting the real Deirdre Burroughs' poetry -- dramatically letting finished pages drift out of her hand -- while wearing the first of a series of wigs Murphy based on his own troubled mother's hairdos. With much input from author and director, she still needed to put her vision on-screen. "I don't consider myself to have done a documentary. This is my own creation of this woman."
