One of my favorite Baldwin performances -- in some ways a forerunner of the one he gives in "Running With Scissors" -- is the one he gives in the 1999 "Outside Providence," directed by Michael Corrente and written by Peter Farrelly. A working-class Rhode Island kid (played by Shawn Hatosy) gets packed off to a prestigious prep school after a run-in with the law. Baldwin plays his dad, an ornery widower given to sitting in front of the TV in his underwear. This is one of the funniest Baldwin performances: You may need to be a New Englander to fully appreciate his character's critique of one girl's baton-twirling prowess as he watches the talent-contest show "Community Auditions," for years a Sunday-morning staple of New England regional TV programming. But Baldwin's perfectly accented delivery translates, regardless. And in one of the picture's most wonderful scenes, this disappointed lug of a guy teaches his clueless son how to tie a necktie, impressing upon him the importance of molding the fabric into a perfect dimple just below the knot: "The vicious 'V,'" he calls it. "The broads love that."
That performance is as touching as it is funny, capturing the essence of a guy who trundles through life, broken by disappointment but still capable of mustering at least a smidgen of enthusiasm for a TV baton-twirler. In "Running With Scissors," Baldwin plays another disappointed guy, and this time the performance goes even deeper. Baldwin did great work in 2006: He appeared in only a few small scenes in Robert De Niro's "The Good Sheperd," as a shadowy government guy, but every time he showed up, he forced some much-needed oxygen into that oppressive, exhausting picture. In Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," he plays an arrogant state police bigwig, the perfect dance partner, figuratively speaking, for Mark Wahlberg's scrappy detective.
But Baldwin's performance in "Running With Scissors" is the one all Baldwin fans need to see. This extremely problematic picture didn't find much of an audience: Understandably, people may have been turned off by the allegations that the author of the supposedly autobiographical source material, Augusten Burroughs, made much of it up.
That has no bearing on what Baldwin does here. Baldwin's character, Norman Burroughs, is a straight-arrow math teacher, a guy who wears suits to work (impossibly square for the late '60s), and who loves his kid but is also utterly bewildered by him. The movie makes no pretense that this is a "good" father; he's an alcoholic, and he leaves the family when Augusten is still young.
But Baldwin, in his body language alone, makes us feel the weight this guy carries. Betty Friedan claimed that one of the reasons she wrote "The Feminine Mystique" was because she saw that the men of her generation (and her father's) were killing themselves, working too hard to succeed. She believed that changing the social order wasn't just a way to tap women's potential, but a way to save men.
Norman Burroughs is a man left behind by the revolution, locked in a traditional role and unable to fill it. Young Augusten, in thrall to his flamboyant, poetry-writing mother, is admittedly an odd child: He boils his allowance money to sterilize it, and then gives it a good polish to make it shiny. His father understands none of this. In the movie's most wrenching scene, he sits down at the kitchen table to watch his son as he goes about this weird little task. He gazes at the kid, filled with wonder and awe: This is the kid he has helped make. But any pride he might take in that is washed away by an even more powerful tide of sadness: "I see nothing of myself in you," he tells his son in a voice soaked and sozzled with weariness as well as booze. He's not cutting the kid down, but admitting his own self-destructive inadequacy. He's a failure who will fail his child, and Baldwin makes us feel the terrible weight of it. That's a lot to pull off in a few brief scenes, and it shows the sense of economy that's common to all great actors: Nothing goes to waste, and almost any scrap can be turned into gold.
About the writer
Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment.
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