Edward Scissorhands (1990)

(Another personal selection, what I consider a modern-day classic.)

By the time Tim Burton released Edward Scissorhands for Christmas of 1990, he was at the top of his game. With Batman a bona fide success the previous year, and his Beetlejuice fast becoming a cult hit and now a Saturday morning cartoon, Burton had made his way up to the list of A-list directors in just under four years. And if Scissorhands isn’t his best film, then it certainly best typifies his signature style – the one that helped set him apart from other directors of his generation.

And, of course, we all know what style that comprises: taking classic elements like Grimm and gothic horror, mixing it with a little Roald Dahl and serving it up for the MTV generation; embracing an outcast protagonist who marches to his own beat ad revealing the inner wisdom of the pariah; and setting everything in a small town stuck in the 50s as a metaphor for brain-addled conformity. All these traits are in perfect display in Scissorhands.

And yes, there’s another one: Johnny Depp. This was Depp’s first film with Burton, obviously not his last, and you can see why the director was drawn to the star. He plays the title role with a quizzical simplicity, the embodiment of all things innocent yet just complex enough to wonder what’s going on behind that pasty-pale face and wild, snaky hair (his appearance feels inspired by the band The Cure). And his scissors? The story explains that he was created by an eccentric inventor (Vincent Price), who had died just as he was ready to replace Ed’s steely fingers with real ones. Now alone in the castle, the malconstructed boy lives as a recluse, bothering no one so long as no one bothers him.

Switch to – an idyllic suburb, circa present day but culturally a page out of Peyton Place. Peg Boggs (Dianne Weist) finds Edward as she attempts to make a Avon call at his castle, and winds up taking the waif home as a live-in guest. Before long he becomes the small town’s cause célèbre, as his dexterity with knives come in mighty handy with topiary, ice sculptures, barbeques and setting the local ladies up with some pretty funky avant garde hairdos. But when Peg’s teenage daughter, Kim (Winona Ryder), returns home from a camping outing, things change. Edward is smitten with her, even following shameless her order to break into her boyfriend’s parents’ home to steal money. The boyfriend, Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), is a real crumball, and pushes Edward to the point that he loses it completely, putting the local police on his tail and riling the whole town up (except he Boggs’) against him. After dishes out just desserts to Jim – permanently – he retreats back to his castle, and to the storybook pages from whence he came.

Of course, there are a great number of logical inconsistencies and lapses of credibility in Edward, starting with notion that an inventor would put knives on his creation until the hands were ready (why not just stubs?). But such queries are foolish – because Burton’s film is a music-box myth, a haunting, ethereal tale filled with snowflakes and choral voices, and its tone prohibits any kind of heady analysis. And no one does it better than Burton, perhaps because he never forgets to tell a clear story amidst all the snow. At no point does style overcome substance – both work in perfect tandem to deliver a work that in stimulating for the eyes and the mind.

And despite some critics and naysayers’ opinions, I believe Burton has a point to make. Unlike other eye-candy directors like Wes Anderson, there’s usually a salient theme in a Burton flick. Here, he’s saying something about an outcast, specifically a physically flawed outcast, and how that individual might somehow benefit society, even one that shuns or oppresses him or her. Like the greatest fantasy or horror works, Scissorhands purveys meaning in metaphor – Edward could have a more realistic deformity, the film could have a more realistic setting, and it would make the exact same point. But it wouldn’t be as palatable an entertainment.

My only quibble with the film has to do with its ending – as Edward is confronted by his nemesis, Kim’s boyfriend, Jim, he stabs his assailant in the gut. Ed receives absolution only through Kim’s lie – that Edward and Jim both killed each other, and that the whole thing is over. The scuffle, and the tension leading up to it, is unnecessarily violent and mean-spirited, and tonally out of sync with the rest of the movie. Burton is no stranger to heavy action and suspense, as evidenced by Batman, but here it just feels out of place.

As we all know, Burton would go on to use Depp in several more of his films – the actor’s innate chameleon-like ability to depict eccentrics with empathy was a perfect for the director’s oddball agenda. (My personal fave was always Ed Wood.) But Scissorhands was where it all began, and it represented the best of both men, and their deliciously off-center perception of the world.

Oh, and let’s not forget Winona Ryder, playing someone relatively “normal” here but still typically fragile and vulnerable. Great work.

And great work all around.

Rating:  ****