Spotlight
Spotlight Date: 3-November-02
Spoiler Rating: High
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
It's not often that you watch a movie years (or even months or weeks) after you last saw it and feel exactly the same about it. You're different each time you watch a film --- new views, altered recollections, changing moods --- so your reactions are almost always different too. What does it mean, then, when you see a movie twelve years after your first exposure to it, and it has the exact same effect upon you? In the case of "Edward Scissorhands," I think it means the filmmaker got it right.
I first saw "Edward Scissorhands" when it opened and really enjoyed its candy-colored suburban setting and sappy romantic ending. Over the past decade, director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp have given us other lovable oddballs on the big screen, but none has been so odd and touching as Edward Scissorhands, a modern-day cross between Frankenstein and Pinocchio. An artificially constructed human, Edward is left alone and unfinished after his creator, a reclusive old inventor (Vincent Price), dies in his hilltop castle. (Why did the inventor put scissors on Edward's wrists while waiting for the hands to be finished? Because Tim Burton is strange.) And there Edward stays, whiling away the hours creating topiary masterpieces, until one day a kind Avon lady named Peg (Dianne Wiest) ventures up from the bottom of the hill, roots him out, and takes him home.
This being a fairy tale, it is no huge surprise for the folks in Peg's world to come face to face with a monster, but Edward is a jolt to their prosaic, narrow existence simply by virtue of his newness. In this cookie-cutter suburbia (creepy because it's only slightly hyperbolic), the women are bored and the men are boring. The women, therefore, immediately take to Edward, seeing in him the answer to all of their longings, maternal, lustful, or otherwise. (The men accept him because they're too dull to rock the boat, and Peg's little boy likes him because he's a hit in show and tell. Only the teenagers, not yet stifled by their adherence to conformity, remain aloof.) From exciting, Edward passes into faddish, becoming the landscaper, dog groomer, and hairstylist of choice not only to Peg's neighbors but to the mayor's wife as well. (Here the teens get on the bandwagon and try to find some way to use Edward to their advantage.) And from faddish, he passes into frightening, when the town discovers he isn't going to save them from themselves and subsequently vilifies him.
Burton's story clearly aims to be a parable about the double-edged fascination of nonconformity in a conventional world, so everyone in the movie is painted in broad (and often humorous) strokes. It still manages to find a heart, though, principally in Wiest's wonderful portrayal of the genial Peg and in the romance between Edward and Kim (Winona Ryder), Peg's budding teenaged daughter, who is pretty and shallow and destined to marry her doltish boyfriend Jim (Anthony Michael Hall) and become like everyone else. While the other people in the town do not change because of their encounter with Edward, Kim somehow opens her eyes to the lessons about goodness and devotion which the monster in her home, quite unintentionally, presents to her. (I say "somehow" because the script is a little weak on the particulars of the Edward-Kim relationship and could have used another scene or two to flesh it out.) Although she is wary of him at first, Kim is won over by Edward's unselfish devotion to her, particularly because it is so different from Jim's horny, manipulative attachment. When Edward is driven back up the hill by an angry mob at the end of the film, he takes with him Kim's heart (not literally --- he's made up of human parts but doesn't collect them), which, as the goofy-sweet ending shows, is a gift he never forgets.
When I watched "Edward Scissorhands" for the second time this past week, the picture charmed me just as it did back in 1990, as if nothing had changed since then --- Johnny Depp had never updated his tattoos, Winona Ryder had never taken to petty crime, Tim Burton had never made "Planet of the Apes," and I had never given way to a mounting tide of cynicism and disbelief. Like all good fairy tales, Burton's love story to the gentle freak in all of us is about ideas and principles more than characters (Depp is solid, of course, but not particularly memorable), and though its point is simple, it leaves a lasting impression. The impression in this case, unassailable by time and circumstance, is one of kindness. Despite its darkly satirical view of suburbia and the cruelty that lurks within it, the movie speaks directly to the notion that loving thy neighbor and sacrificing one's self for others, no matter how futile, is its own reward. Sure, the ending is unabashedly sappy, but like all the best things in life, it is simple, true, and bittersweet. "Edward Scissorhands," in teaching us to be true to ourselves, remains true to itself, no matter when or where you watch it .
Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
