Edward (Johnny Depp), the hero of Tim Burton's
whimsical and haunting modern fairy tale Edward Scissorhands,
is a shy, spectral boy with a beautiful powder-white face, a shock of
black hair, and, where each of his hands should be, a complicated array
of two-foot-long scissor blades — one set of shears for each ''finger''
– that seem both organic and mechanical. He's joined to those
treacherous steel appendages (they really are his hands), but they're
also the one part of him that isn't quite human.
Edward lives in an old gray horror-movie castle that looms up absurdly
over the tract houses. It's there that he was created by the Inventor
(Vincent Price), a kindly Gepetto figure who neglected to give him human
hands. When the local Avon Lady (Dianne Wiest) pays a visit there and
finds Edward sitting alone, she takes him back and makes him a part
of her family. The movie turns into a fish-out-of-water comedy, like
Splash or E.T., with Edward the humanoid visitor struggling
to fit into his new world. Most of the neighbors are amusingly nonchalant
about having Edward in their midst. He begins to decorate the neighborhood
with his hedge sculptures, and he proves a wizardly hairdresser, too.
For the local sexpot (Kathy Baker), getting her hair molded by Edward's
chattering
scissors is the most erotic experience of her life.
As an image, a presence, Edward is at once poetic and heartbreaking,
and the innocent aggression implicit in his hands creates undercurrents
of rich, subversive comedy. Depp may not be doing that much acting beneath
his neo-Kabuki makeup, but what he does is tremulous and affecting.
And Danny Elfman's lovely, storybook score highlights the pop romanticism
of Burton's conception. The romanticism has a personal dimension –
for Edward is, of course, Burton's surreal portrait of himself as an
artist: a wounded child converting his private darkness into outlandish
pop visions. Like Edward, he finds the light. — Owen Glieberman,
Entertainment Weekly
|
