by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles one of the videos I’d just ordered from
amazon.com: what was billed as the 25th anniversary Blu-Ray edition
of the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands.
This was a movie that had somehow eluded me when it came out — and Charles
hadn’t seen it either, mainly because when it came out he was living with his
mother in Grass Valley, California and ironically it was easier to see
obscurities and art films there (an amateur ran his own pocket cinema under the
stars and booked oddball fare) than a mainstream movie (for which he’d have to
go to Nevada City) — even though Edward Scissorhands is a “mainstream movie” only in that it was made by
an established studio (20th Century-Fox) and featured a director
(Tim Burton) who already had mainstream hits under his belt (the original
trailers advertised it as “From the Director of Batman and Beetlejuice”) as well as at least an “A-minus list,” if not an “A-list,” cast. The
star is Johnny Depp, who had made his feature-film debut in the original 1984 A
Nightmare on Elm Street and had had the
lead role in John Waters’ Cry-Baby
but was best known for his role on the TV series 21 Jump Street. Ironically, Tim Burton had never seen 21
Jump Street when he agreed to cast Depp in
the title role of Edward Scissorhands — replacing either his or the studio’s first choice, Tom Cruise, who
would have been terrible in the role. (Cruise wanted Burton and his co-writer,
Caroline Thompson, to rewrite the story to have a happy ending.) This was the
beginning of the long-term collaboration between Burton and Depp, which strikes
me as one of the strongest and most interesting director-star partnerships in
film history, alongside George Cukor/Katharine Hepburn, John Ford/John Wayne,
John Huston/Humphrey Bogart, and Douglas Sirk/Rock Hudson. It was also the
first collaboration between Burton and composer Danny Elfman, who started in music
as the leader of the band Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (later abbreviated
simply to “Oingo Boingo”) and who, like the star, was only a second choice.
Burton made Edward Scissorhands’ hair resemble that of Robert Smith, leader of
the rock band The Cure (whose music was so notoriously depressing they were
sometimes jokingly referred to as “Music to Commit Suicide By”), and he also
wanted Smith to do the film’s score. But Smith turned it down and Burton hired
Elfman, who took to writing an orchestral film score after an experience doing
little but rock like the proverbial duck to water, supplying a score that
perfectly captured the bittersweet mood of the story.
Plotwise, Edward
Scissorhands is an interesting variation on
Frankenstein — though like the original
film of Blade Runner, Edward Scissorhands actually captures more of the pathos and dramatic sophistication of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel
than any of the direct adaptations (though, thanks to the genius of director
James Whale and writer John L. Balderston, The Bride of Frankenstein came close). The film starts with vistas of a
haunted old castle looming over a modern suburban development (though exactly when
Edward Scissorhands takes place isn’t clear
— judging from the cars, room décors and hairstyles, my guess is the
mid-1970’s) which is first represented by an overhead shot of a model of such
deliberate obviousness Charles couldn’t help but quote the line from Monty
Python and the Holy Grail: “It’s only a
model.” When we see the actual homes of the characters — or at least the
clapboard false fronts representing them — they’re not much more realistic than
that model: like Jim Sharman in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (another Frankenstein knockoff!), Burton and his set designer, Bo Welch, deliberately
made the “normal” settings of the story look artificial and phony to send the
message that it is the fantasy characters who have the more “real” (and
realistically portrayed) inner lives. After a brief establishing shot of that
mystery castle and then the model shot of suburbia, Edward
Scissorhands opens with Avon saleslady Peg
(Dianne Wiest, three years after she similarly interacted with fantastic
characters in The Lost Boys)
having a frustrating day of turn-downs (her low point was when she demonstrated
her entire catalog in front of a 12-year-old girl who burst her bubble when she
said, “You really don’t think I have any money, do you?”) and finally deciding
to drive up the long, winding road to that old haunted castle. When she arrives
she discovers Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp), alone in that old house,
wearing a studded black leather jumpsuit that looks like one of Michael
Jackson’s stage outfits and shocking Peg because he has scissor blades instead
of hands. He can manipulate these as if they were fingers but he can’t actually
grip anything with them — though he keeps trying — and about the one thing he
can do with his hands the way they are is trim bushes into fantastic topiary
sculptures. Peg immediately takes pity on Edward and offers to take him in
without bothering to ask anyone else in her family, which includes her husband
Bill (Alan Arkin) and their kids, teenage daughter Kim (Winona Ryder,
second-billed to Depp) and prepubescent son Kevin (Robert Oliveri).
There are
some charming fish-out-of-water scenes of Edward trying to eat normal human
food (he ultimately gives up on tableware and spears individual peas with the
ends of his scissor fingers) and poking holes in Kim’s waterbed when he tries
to sleep in it. Bill warns Edward that if he wants to survive in the normal
world he needs to figure out how to make some money, and the opportunity comes
along when one of the women in town asks Edward to clip her poodle. He does
such a stunning job he’s in-demand as a dog groomer, and when one of his female
customers asks if he can do her
hair as well, he’s got a new career as a hairdresser. One of the local women
offers to open a salon with him — she’ll run the business end, Edward will do
the hair styling and Peg can have a cosmetics counter — but she’s really after Edward’s body. She takes him into the back
room of the space in the local mall she’s thinking of renting, and while there
she sexually assaults him, only just as the situation is heating up and one
wonders how Burton and Thompson are going to write themselves out of the
predicament they’ve written themselves into, the chair they’re making out on
(with Edward expressing the same naïve inability to comprehend just what this woman wants from him that Stan Laurel did in
similar seduction sequences in the Laurel and Hardy movies) collapses. Then it
turns out that no one in Peg’s circle has the money for seed capital for
Edward’s salon, and after the local bank turns them down Kim’s boyfriend Jim
(the hot, hunky Anthony Michael Hall) concocts a scheme by which Edward, whose
scissorhands make him an ace lock-picker, will burglarize Jim’s father and get
around the elaborate security systems his dad has installed. Only it’s a trap:
what Jim really wants is to get
Edward arrested and disgraced because he’s jealous of how Kim is responding to
him. Jim’s scheme not only works, it leads to the humiliation and ostracism of
Peg’s and Kim’s entire family. No one comes to their annual Christmas party, and eventually Edward is driven
out of the community and the villagers — oops, I mean the suburbanites — chase
him to the haunted castle from whence he came.
In the meantime we’ve got two
flashbacks relating Edward’s origins: he’s an artificial human, created by the
castle’s previous occupant, a mystery man known only as “The Inventor” (Vincent
Price, in his final film — like Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green, the terminally ill Price was cast and delivered a
moving death scene as his final work in films — though Burton signed Leonard
Nimoyto take over the part in case Price croaked before he shot all the
character’s footage; certainly Price got a better exit than Boris Karloff did
in that wretched Snake People and
the three other films he shot for Azteca Studios in the last month of his
life!), who gave Edward everything else he needed (including a heart the
Inventor made from a heart-shaped cookie!) and was just about to install hands,
replacing the scissors he’d intended only as temporary place-holders, when he
suddenly died. Jim and his friends, driving a black van with “fire” trim that
reminded me of the one in the TV cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, nearly run down Kim’s brother Kevin. Edward saves
Kevin’s life from the runaway van but in the process scratches Kevin’s face,
and that just inflames the locals even more. Jim and his crew hunt down Edward
and Jim carries a gun, intending to kill him. Edward kills Jim instead and Kim
descends from the mountain with one of Edward’s scissorhands, saying they
killed each other —and then the film flashes back to its opening with Kim as an
old woman (Winona Ryder in heavy age makeup) reading Edward’s tale as a bedtime
story to her granddaughter, and we get a final sequence of Edward skulking
around That Castle, presumably for eternity because as a mechanical contraption
instead of a living being, he need never die.
I suspect I avoided Edward
Scissorhands when it was new because the
concept seemed too grotesque to be entertaining, but it turned out to be a
quite remarkable movie with a lot of marvelous touches — and I think it
especially affected me because I’ve spent most of my adult life helping people
with various disabilities even though it was frustrating that over half a
minute of screen time elapsed between the time Bill poured a drink for Edward
and the time it finally occurred
to him to give Edward a straw so he could drink it without being able to grip
the glass and lift it to his mouth. The most moving scene in that regard is the
one that got used in all the trailers — Kim, who’s realized she’s in love with
Edward, asks him to hold her, he briefly ponders the mechanics of this and
finally says, sadly, “I can’t,” before she takes charge and pulls his arms
around her. Edward
Scissorhands holds up as quite a beautiful
movie, full of pathos and dramatic richness (one wishes someone would actually
have directed an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with the sensitivity director Burton and co-writer
Thompson brought to this film!), with an understated but nonetheless quite
evident bit of social satire of the dullness of suburbia and the way it’s
killed the imaginations of virtually everyone who lives there.
