“Amelie” meets “Naked Lunch” in Michel Gondry’s glorious “The Science of Sleep.” The almost unbearably appealing Gael Garcia Bernal (“Y tu Mamá También”) plays a shy, creative artist, who is stuck in a monotonous job, pining for his neighbor, and missing his recently deceased father. His vivid dreams begin to take over his life, and he has trouble telling what’s what as the line between reality and fantasy blur.
Gondry’s visual acrobatics shine in this marvelous dreamscape. As he showed in the wonderful “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” he has an amazing ability to capture the slippery world of sleep, and the disorienting undulations of his backdrops, the weirdly off manner of speaking, and the scraps of references to reality are amazingly familiar from our own hard-to-relay dreams. The results are truly stunning, and this movie has some indelibly beautiful images, including a bathtub full of blue cellophane, a horse made of felt and a movie studio made of corrugated cardboard, meant to represent the dreamer’s mind.
Saved from being too cute by that unresolved quality more common to foreign films than American ones (this one is in French, Spanish and English), “Science of Sleep” is more incredible looking but less moving than “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” On that one, he shared writing credits with the cerebral but wacky Charlie Kaufman; this film was written and directed by Michel Gondry alone. This does not deliver the emotional response that “Eternal Sunshine” did, but it is truly exquisite and exciting to watch.
“The Science of Sleep” is currently available to rent.
In the film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs popular memoir “Running with Scissors,” style also trumps feeling. However, this is less successful than in “The Science of Sleep.” One certainly hopes that this supposedly true story of a dreadful, but colorful, childhood is exaggerated. However, the result in this film is that scenes of true emotional horrors are dulled by a kind of black humor. This blending of tones rings a little false and both the humor and the horror are diminished.
This is by no means a bad movie. Annette Bening is typically terrific as Burroughs’ dramatic, adored, but ultimately awful mother. A woman obsessed with her own career as a writer and herself, in general, she fails her only son totally by the time he is in his teens and his father has left. Augusten is horrified to find himself living with his mother’s shrink, a man whose complete permissiveness is excessive, to say the least.
I was excited to see Joseph Fiennes make an appearance, albeit disfigured by a moustache, and Gwyneth Paltrow is good as the colder of Augusten’s two adopted sisters. However, this movie suffers from too much vignette-ness and fails to form a cohesive whole. Terrible things keep happening to Burroughs, but we cannot care too much. His mother and her therapist enact some hideous psychological trauma on young Augusten, but, despite his voiceover narration, an emotional core never really develops.
There is the concept of laughing to keep from crying, but that is not really what’s going on here. Rather, this movie is too cool to cry. A little sincerity would have brought it to another level, but an artful exaggeration reigns instead. This results in a fun movie that you cannot fully enjoy because of the dark subject matter. Stylized but not entirely successful, “Running with Scissors” suffers from the typical adolescent anxiety: identity crisis.
“Running with Scissors” is currently available to rent.
Contact Asia Frey at afrey@lagniappemobile.com.
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