Edward Scissorhands

(1990) dir. Tim Burton
viewed: 02/07/08

I’d long had Edward Scissorhands queued to re-watch.  It was one of those films that I saw at the time it had come out and never again, despite having liked it fairly well.  And whether or not I think positively of Tim Burton or not, I tend to still be drawn to his movies and in some ways have been hoping to find the little tidbits of potential that he seems to squander even in his best works.

A consumate fantasy, told in flash-back by a prosthetically aged Winona Ryder, the film is in many ways a critique of society, and if you look into it, it’s a pretty harsh critique.  Edward, a man-made man (made by Vincent Price in his final screen role), is a child in the body of a Goth-fantasy.  He’s Robert Smith’s head on the bondage body of the “Pinhead” of the Hellraiser (1987) movies, with giant, Freddy-Kreuger-like scissor-hands.  And he enters a world where everything is pastel as hell, people drive the same cars, and have perspectives as limited as their front yards.

At first, he is a novelty.  An artist with his scissors on topiary, pet grooming, or hair-styling, he is adored.  But when a couple of characters turn against him out of jealousy and rejection, he becomes a literal Frankenstein’s monster, chased by an angry mob to his old home on the hill.  The set design would be purely absurd if it wasn’t so clearly some form of allegory.  Edward’s home is on a lone black hill, in a secluded castle that overlooks suburbia.

His hands, incomplete from his build-out due to the death of his creator, leaves him unable to “touch” and his isolation has made him shy.  But his goodness is quickly seen by the Avon visitor who brings him home and tries to teach him well.  The only family on the block with a sense of conscience and goodness.  Johnny Depp, in his first role for Tim Burton, is the death-rock fantasy of internalized shyness and artistic, romantic soul who is an utter outcast in the world.

He falls immediately for Winona Ryder, who is disappointingly blond in this film, playing the cheerleader/homecoming queen to her boyfriend, the pumped up and evil Anthony Michael Hall (no longer a skinny dweeb as he’s been in his John Hughes films).  He’s actually so evil as to be uninteresting.  And the high drama of the ending seems a bit unnecessarily over-the-top.

But Burton is shooting for movie magic here, fantasy, romaticism.  And the scene that drives the romantic story, of why it snows on this little burg, is because Depp is still up on that mountain making magical ice sculptures and sending down the downy shavings of ice like big flakes of snow for her to bask in.  Awwww.

The film is likable.  Not as funny or enchanting as it could be.  The best moment is when Edward kindly snips the bangs for a dog that comes to comfort him in his dour time.  The dog licks him to say thanks.

Burton hit his tops with Ed Wood (1994), his second pairing with Depp, with whom he has now made a number of films.  I had hopes early on that Burton would become great.  His designs are wonderful and occasionally his ideas sparkle.  But he’s lazy in the material he chooses, maybe because Edward Scissorshands, his most personal work, inspired by a story that he co-authored, didn’t achieve the commerical success of his Batman (1989) movies, and so he’s stuck with re-inventing or re-making things, rather than trying to do something genuinely unique.  This was perhaps his closest shot at it, and it almost works.  It has charm, and I am sure that there are many who swoon with it still for its sweet heart.