AND YOU THINK YOUR FAMILY IS WEIRD?

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

Many people adore Augusten Burroughs' memoir of his peculiarly alarming youth, ``Running With Scissors.'' And Ryan Murphy is clearly one of them.

The creator of TV's inventively bent ``Nip/Tuck'' series, Murphy displays a sincere respect for Burroughs' story in practically every frame of this adaptation, which also marks the television producer's feature-directing debut.

But the finished product leaves us wishing that, perhaps, Murphy had been a little less reverent. Or at least more willing to emphasize the humor in Burroughs' dire coming-of-age chronicle. Being raised by a series of lunatics can't be much fun, but Burroughs managed to see the humor in it all the way through his book. The movie kind of stops being funny about 15 minutes in, or at least Murphy loses the ability to make you smile as young Augusten's situation goes from bad to weirder to worse and weirder still.

A fantastic performance by Annette Bening as Burroughs' pretentious, chemically unbalanced mother always demands attention (and unfailingly rewards it). Otherwise, though, the film quickly becomes inaccessible to persons who did not grow up among pseudo-intellectuals or psychiatry freaks, or presuming that every adult they knew was insane.

The quick synopsis, for those not in the know: Augusten (played well as a teenager by Joseph Cross) was dumped at the wacky, messy home of his mom Deirdre's bizarro shrink, Dr. Finch (Brian Cox, the last of the well-cast, or at least fully developed, part of the ensemble), following her divorce from her fed-up, alcoholic husband (Alec Baldwin).

See, mom needed space to pursue her destiny as a great poet whose work only sounds bad -- and also to take the overload of Valium treatment Dr. Finch has prescribed (hey, it was the 1970s). Fastidious young Auggie is appalled by the unsanitary kitchen conditions, ``art''/(actually trash)-strewn lawn and vulgar pinkness of Finch's listing Victorian house, but heck, the prissy kid could use some shaking up.

He certainly gets that from his nutty new housemates, most of whom are given two-dimensional treatment. Gwyneth Paltrow plays a Christian stick-in-the-mud, Evan Rachel Wood serves up an undercooked variation on her more resonant Lolita-pops, Jill Clayburgh is mostly zomboid as Finch's burned-out wife, and Joseph Fiennes is poignant enough, but a little too jittery, as the other, more disturbed ``adopted'' son who becomes Auggie's first lover.

While trying to find his path in life between all of these human land mines, Augusten remains obsessed with his abandoning mother. And it's easy to see why. Moving charismatically from self-confident to pathetically devastated, Bening makes Deirdre a bewitching presence, one you want to love (or somehow make love you) as much as you want to flee from. Yes, she's a crazy lady, which enables a showy performance. But with Bening's skilled go-for-broke approach, Deirdre's moods are never simple and are always informed by an intricately worked-out cocktail of motives and resentments.

And Bening makes Deirdre the funniest thing in ``Running With Scissors,'' too, making you wish the movie had been about her. As it is, when Bening's not on screen, what we see is usually too superficial or unadventurously heartfelt to do the material justice.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS - Two and one half stars

(R: language, drug use, adult themes)

Starring: Joseph Cross, Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood, Alec Baldwin, Jill Clayburgh.

Director: Ryan Murphy.

Running time: 2 hr. 1 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; The Grove, Farmers Market; AMC 15, Century City.

In a nutshell: Augusten Burroughs' widely read memoir is turned into a sometimes too-serious -- otherwise not-deep-enough -- family dysfunction movie. Bening is monstrously magnificent, though.