"Sometimes you can still catch me dancing"

Rating: 10/10 (4 December 2011)

Stories get reused all the time. Whether consciously or unconsciously, movies will reference or reshape far older narratives. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the best writers do not so much steal ideas as respectfully blend or rework them, often to rekindle the thoughts and emotions of the previous generation around the preoccupations of the present one. As the filmmakers of the modern era became ever more retrospective, such movies became more common.
Edward Scissorhands is scripted by Caroline Thompson from ideas by director Tim Burton. As has often been commented, it has a fair amount in common with Frankenstein (more the 1931 James Whale/Boris Karloff picture than Mary Shelley's novel - the narrative influences are strictly movieland). But it takes even more from the lesser-known story Being There, brought to film in 1979 with Peter Sellers, about a man (possibly autistic) who has been brought up in one house, seeing the outside world for the first time and being mistaken for a genius. Thompson and Burton channel these influences but give the whole thing the qualities of a modern day fairy tale – a fable about surviving society as a misunderstood outcast. The titular scissorhands – probably the most unique thing about the story – are the literal extensions of a person who cannot get close to anyone without unwittingly doing harm.
Just as the screenplay borrows from here and there, so too does Burton take cues from his cinematic forebears in the look of Edward Scissorhands. There are some clear nods to the weird, Gothic style of German Expressionism, but also contemporaries of his like Roman Polanski, Terry Gilliam and Paul Verhoeven, directors who have specialised in taking the real world (or something like it) and making it look baroque and alien. Burton was always more an artist than a technician. His designs for the picture and the way he frames them with the camera create a small town that is both familiar but eerily strange. There aren't too many connections to reality – no visible place names or brands. The houses, cars and clothing look normal apart from the abundance of tawdry, cartoonish shades. This is not mere stylisation – it is of utmost importance for the whole thing to work. The world Burton presents is just weird enough for us to believe the inhabitants wouldn't bat an eyelid at the huge Gothic mansion looming over of the town or think a man with scissors for hands was anything more than a subject for neighbourhood gossip. The snow-covered 20th Century Fox logo at the beginning of the movie is all part of the plan. We can't be distracted by the gold and fanfare of the usual logo; we must have total immersion.
The disparate influences of Edward Scissorhands extend to the performances. Lead man Johnny Depp studied the work of Charlie Chaplin in preparation for the role, something I guessed at even before I read about it. There is something very Chaplinesque in his shuffling walk and the way he innocently investigates his environment – a wordless expression of personality that is very endearing. But the best bits of Depp's performance happen on his face. He runs a gamut of emotions, filtered through this incredibly stilted exterior, from that nervous smile we see when he rides in Diane Wiest's car to the quiet anger he shows towards Anthony Michael Hall. Other than Depp, there's an excellently deadpan turn from Alan Arkin which provides a lot of the humour. The most honourable mention however must go to Vincent Price, whose appearance is brief yet has an added layer of poignancy with knowledge of the elderly actor's long and distinguished career as a patriarch of Hollywood horror.
Edward Scissorhands is a movie so contemporary in its style, and yet so dependent on the influence of the past. The whole tapestry is new but every strand with which it has been woven has been seen before. And yet it has all done been done with such precision and above all such appropriateness, that even when its derivations become obvious, they only serve to deepen the power and clarify the meaning of the picture. After all, a good movie is the sum of its parts.