The Gentle Frankenstein

Rating: 10/10 (15 July 2009)

In case no one has noticed it actor Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton have collaborated on six joint projects, certainly enough to qualify them as a screen team like Wayne and Ford and DeNiro and Scorsese. But in my humble opinion they have not topped Edward Scissorhands their first and best work together.
I think the part of Edward Scissorhands, the gentle Frankenstein like creation of Vincent Price, was Johnny Depp's real breakout role. Around this time Depp was at a real critical point in his career. He was a teenage idol due to his role on 21 Jump Street, but he had it in his head he could do some really serious work. It would have been easy to go with the flow and stayed with the series a few more years and make a pile of money. Sad to say though once teenage idols lose their vehicles very few have careers of the first rank, no matter how talented they are.
Instead Johnny Depp remained true to himself and confident in his abilities and it paid off. This role was so unlike what he had done before and his is a career that keeps reinventing itself with every film. This was his first reinvention and it remains my favorite film of his.
Edward Scissorhands is a fable like a modern Grimm fairy tale with nods of acknowledgment to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Peter Sellers character in Being There. Edward is a creation like the Frankenstein monster, but it's no criminal brain that's commanding his body. He's as innocent as a babe, a real live boy, but with a pair of hands made from garden clippers, sharp as a razor. His inventor Vincent Price died before giving him human hands leaving an innocent with what could be deadly weapons.
His innocence is preserved when Dianne Weist the Avon Lady from the neighborhood goes to the Gothic house that looms over her neat suburban pastel neighborhood. I've got to hand it to Tim Burton for those pastel suburban sets showing the stultifying conformity, contrasting to Vincent Price's place. The shots of the ordinary suburban types doing their daily thing say more than 100 pages of dialog.
Weist takes him home, Depp has survived in the place, God only knows how. She seeks to integrate him into life. Those scissorhands prove to be quite popular as he sculpts designs in the suburban hedges, and then goes into hairdressing where he works at a fantastic pace.
Depp's as innocent as Peter Sellers let out into the real world in being there. But said to say it all works out like it did for Boris Karloff in Frankenstein.
Besides those I've already mentioned, pay note to the performances of Winona Ryder as Weist's daughter, Anthony Michael Hall as her jock boyfriend whose jealousy starts Edward's world unraveling and Kathy Baker who stepped out of Desperate Housewives for her role.
This was Vincent Price's farewell performance on the big screen. He did one more made for television film and then after he died a cartoon version of Arabian Nights which was shelved for 20 years was released. In the Citadel Film series book, The Films of Vincent Price, Johnny Depp paid a fine tribute to Price saying he was a wonderful man to work with and a real inspiration. Price also gave him some good financial advice. Buy art as the best hedge against inflation in hard times. And Vincent Price certainly knew his art.
With all these fine people in it, the film is owned body and soul by Johnny Depp. His performance in which his dialog is kept to a minimum due to the character is an object lesson of how much emotion one can convey with both lack of dialog and heavy makeup. Speaking of which the only Oscar this film was nominated for was in the Makeup category and it lost to Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy. How Johnny Depp didn't get a nomination at least is a disgrace.
You watch Edward Scissorhands and I recommend you watch it as a triple feature with Frankenstein and Being There and it will blow you away.