a sweet film that portrays the good and bad in suburban life with originality

Rating: 9/10 (8 April 2006)

Every couple of years I sit and watch Edward Scissorhands when it's on TV, just as a reminder of how much Tim Burton can do so well storytelling on a kind of universal level. As the film is much like a fairy tale like the Ugly Duckling, it can work for young and old. But it would be just a very good children's film if not for Burton's iconoclastic kind of vision, which has its form here in one of its most pure sightings (as he rarely writes his own films, this is one of the few that mark as his completely). The characters are not complicated at all, and anything standing between the two who fall for one another- Johnny Depp's Edward and Winona Ryder's Kim- is just attitudes in a small town kind of atmosphere. It's actually a film even more based on behavior than actual plot, and despite the absurdity nature given to the look of the town and the obviously Gothic look of Vincent Price's Professor's castle, it's as much a tome of American drama as American Beauty is, in its way.
Depp is in his breakout performance here, with the role that took him apart from his 21 Jump Street days as a character who could just as well work, if not better, as a silent-film character. In fact, the kind of Lon Chaney characteristic that's been applied to Depp in the past years is more than evident in this film, as his wounded Edward has a vulnerability that Depp rarely gets to play this well. The roundup of supporting actors is quite good too, with Dianne Weist as the housewife who finds him in the castle and takes him down to the town. Ryder too is in a good role too, especially when playing off of the very against type Anthony Michael Hall (yes, the Breakfast Club nerd) as a jock who becomes quite an antagonist. The little scenes of Edward acclamating to the small-town life, cutting and shaping hair and bushes his specialty, are interesting and amusing. But it's in the final fifteen to twenty minutes when the darker portion of this tale takes shape. And, it's likely, aside from scenes in Big Fish, the most affecting Burton's ever fashioned.
One of the better films of 1990.