Lolli's Filmseiten

Edward Scissorhands

Inhalt & Kritik

Mensch und Monster - Tim Burtons Märchenkomödie mit Johnny Depp und Winona Ryder definiert den Frankenstein-Stoff neu.
Die adrette "Avon"-Beraterin Peg (Dianne Wiest) lebt in einem sterilen Vorort, über dem eine alte Burg thront. Eines Tages entdeckt sie dort einen künstlichen Menschen (Johnny Depp), der durch den Tod seines Erfinders (Vincent Price) nicht "vollendet" wurde: Anstelle von Händen besitzt er messerscharfe Scheren. Edward wird bald überall als Haarstylist und Gärtner geschätzt. Als er sich aber in Pegs Tochter Kim (Winona Ryder) verliebt, ist er bald das ungeliebte "Monster"...
Schon mit "Beatlejuice" und "Batman" bewies Regisseur Tim Burton sein Händchen für phantastische Stoffe. Statt üblicher Trick- und Action-Orgien liefert er diesmal - so ganz nebenbei - eine gelungene Persiflage auf den "American way of lifw". Klasse!

TV-Spielfilm

Eine spitze Fabel vom Regisseur Tim Burton, in der grundsetzliche Lebensweisheiten mit sanft vermittelt werden. Edward— die unfertige Creation eines gutmütigen verückten Wissenschaftlers, der starb, bevor er sein "Kind" vollendet hatte - wird von einer Hausfrau aus der Vorstadt entdeckt, die versucht ihn in ihre Gemeinde zu integrieren. In einem hervorragendem Ensemble gibt Depp eine vielseitige Vorstellung.
Eine erinnerungswürdige Kameraführung von Danny Elfman bringt einen dabei in die richtige Stimmung.

David Mermelstein

From E.T. to the Elephant Man to the Ugly Duckling, the noble-hearted outsider getting persecuted by society may be the oldest -- and most touching -- story in the book.
In "Edward Scissorhands," director Tim Burton gives that perennial tale a gothic-goofy twist, with amusing nods to Mary Shelley, MTV, the Brothers Grimm and Ozzie and Harriet. This extended parable about a shy punk-being (Johnny Depp) with blades for fingers, the high school girl (Winona Ryder) he's sweet on, and the gonzo-suburban world that fences them in may be on the palatably PG-13 side, but it's nonetheless amusing and inventive. Depp is perfectly cast, Burton builds a surrealistically funny cul-de-sac world, and there are some very funny performances from grownups Dianne Wiest, Kathy Baker and Alan Arkin.
Depp, a leather-jacketed, reclusive soul created by since-deceased inventor Vincent Price, is invited from his castle by benevolent Avon-lady Wiest, then adopted. He and his scissorhands are an immediate hit. Those blades turn out to be Rodin-tested when it comes to lonely women's hairdos, poodles and garden shrubbery. But they're not so good with people; he keeps hurting himself and others unintentionally. Depp also finds himself hopelessly in love with Ryder (Wiest's daughter), who's going with oafish (and vengeful) Anthony Michael Hall.
Hall's bad-boy doings set off a chain of events that leave Depp in a mistakenly criminal light. Suddenly the neighborhood's exotic hero is a freakish rebel on the run and the chances of a Depp-Ryder romance (other than in real life) seem doomed. The whole finale is an obviously trumped up scenario to push Depp into a martyr role, and its conclusion will leave more than a few viewers dissatisfied. But there's too much to enjoy to let that ruin a good time.
Depp is tender, affecting and, quite frankly, bloody pretty. Baker is serenely tacky as the sexually frustrated housewife who makes an intestinal-pink "ambrosia salad" and can't wait to jump on Depp's blades. Squinty-eyed Wiest is perfect as the dippy mother who sells cosmetics. "Hello, Avon calling," she pipes upon entering the dark, foreboding, cobwebbed interior of Depp's castle.
Burton, a kitsching cousin to the satirical skewpoints of Gary Larson, David Lynch, Erroll Morris and others, fills the movie with many of these, well, Burtonisms. Depp's castle, for instance, just happens to be located at the end of the road everyone lives on, a huge gothic structure towering above the homogenous houses. When Depp moves into the neighborhood, it isn't long before the street is a veritable gallery of crazy, front-lawn hedge creations, from dolphins to dinosaurs. He can also dice up a mean cole slaw and make brochettes with his hands. And when Ryder sees the cowering Depp for the first time and screams, you should see what he does to the water bed.

Desson Howe, Washington Post (December 14, 1990)

'Edward Scissorhands' is a fairy tale of 'shear' purity Frankenstein meets Peter Pan in Spielbergian suburbia in this delicate, endearing Gothic fairy tale for the 1990s.
The director, Tim Burton, immediately establishes an atmosphere of enchantment and sustained whimsy by showering the 20th Century Fox logo with a snowstorm, and he keeps the film suspended in this magical state until it reaches its bittersweet, uncompromised finale.
In the title role, Johnny Depp is otherworldly perfection, playing a boy who has scissors instead of hands; he was created by a semi-mad, now-deceased scientist (played by Vincent Price, of course). Dianne Wiest is the soul of matronly generosity as the Avon lady who finds and adopts him, and Burton's Beetlejuice discovery, Winona Ryder, fits right in as Wiest's daughter, who is initially put off by Edward but eventually finds herself drawn to his unworldly world view.
The Price character created Edward in a Gothic castle plunked down in the middle of a 1950-ish suburban block (the incongruity is barely noted by the pastel-addicted residents), and he died before he could finish the job. As a result, Edward is a freakish mixture of childlike humanity and shear destructiveness, doomed never to grow up or share a home with other creatures.
But he does have ugly-duckling talents that, for a while, endear him to people. Barely able to lift food off a plate, he's nevertheless a whiz with haircuts, dog grooming and shrubbery-trimming. Like Boris Karloff's Frankenstein monster, he also has a trusting sweetness that gets him in trouble, mostly because it's tied up with his inability to read people's hidden motives.
When a housewife (Kathy Baker) has an orgasmic response to the haircut he's just given her, or a jock bully (Anthony Michael Hall) lures him into a trap, he doesn't know how to respond. His bewilderment and blind fury transform him into a menace, at least to the closed-in society to which he tries to adjust.
Because Edward Scissorhands is Burton's most personal film, it's received some knocks for being his most self-indulgent as well. Unlike Batman, Beetlejuice and Pee-wee's Big Adventure, it was his creation from the beginning, and it's been criticized for its use of stock characters (especially the roles played by Baker and Hall) and his reliance on freaky art direction, Danny Elfman's music and charmingly fake special effects - all of which have become Burton signatures.
But the film has an unapologetically adolescent purity about it that transcends what would ordinarily be the shortcomings of its script. Burton creates his own world, makes his own rules, as do few other filmmakers working in American major-studio productions.
The movie is shot through with moods, sounds and images that cannot be mistaken for those of any other filmmaker. The squeaky scissor sounds of Edwards' "hands," the dreamy assembly line of Price's toy bakery, a dinner-table ethics discussion led by Alan Arkin, Ryder's ecstatic dance in an scissor-sculpted snowstorm, a fundamentalist's tango-beat version of a Christmas carol, a little girl listening to a bedtime story while lost in a huge, enveloping bed - these touches are pure Burton.
On one level, Edward Scissorhands can be read as a paranoid, undoubtedly autobiographical teen fantasy, about a misfit who is incapable of finding his place in the adult world. As such, it may seem thin and self-pitying.
But Burton's direction raises it to another level: that of an enchanted nostalgic fable, told by an old woman who remembers the hero just as Wendy remembers Peter Pan - not as a tragic figure, but as a lost boy who found his own reason for being.

John Hart, Film.com

The director Tim Burton wages a valiant battle to show us new and wonderful things. In a Hollywood that placidly recycles the same old images, Burton uses special effects and visual tricks to create sights that have never been seen before. That is the good news. The disappointment is that Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.
That was true even of his "Batman," which was 1989's box office champion, but could have been a better film, I believe, if there had been anyone in it to inspire our emotional commitment. Even comic characters can make us care. Unlike Richard Donner's original "Superman," which actually had a heart beneath its special effects, Burton's "Batman" occupied a terrain in which every character was a grotesque of one sort of another, and all of their actions were inspired by shallow melodramatic motivations.
That movie was stolen by a supporting character - Jack Nicholson's Joker - and now comes "Edward Scissorhands," another inventive effort in which the hero is strangely remote. He is intended, I think, as an everyman, a universal figure like one of the silent movie clowns, who exists on a different plane from the people he meets in his adventures. One problem is that the other people are as weird, in their ways, as he is: Everyone in this film is stylized and peculiar, so he becomes another exhibit in the menagerie, instead of a commentary on it.
The movie takes place in an entirely artificial world, where a haunting gothic castle crouches on a mountaintop high above a storybook suburb, a goofy sitcom neighborhood where all of the houses are shades of pastels and all of the inhabitants seem to be emotional clones of the Jetsons. The warmest and most human resident of this suburb is the Avon lady (Dianne Wiest), who comes calling one day at the castle - not even its forbidding facade can deter her - and finds it occupied only by a lonely young man named Edward (Johnny Depp).
His story, told in a flashback, is a sad one. He was created by a mad inventor (Vincent Price), who was almost finished with his task when he died, leaving Edward with temporary scissors in place of real hands. One look at Edward and we see that scissors are inconvenient substitutes for fingers: His face is a mass of scars, and he tends to shred everything he tries to pick up.
The Avon lady isn't fazed. She bundles Edward into her car and drives him back down the mountain to join her family, which includes daughter Kim (Winona Ryder) and husband Bill (Alan Arkin). The neighbors in this suburb are insatiably curious, led by a nosy neighbor named Joyce (Kathy Baker). The movie then develops into a series of situations that seem inspired by silent comedy, as when Edward tries to pick up a pea.
Successful satire has to have a place to stand, and a target to aim at. The entire world of "Edward Scissorhands" is satire, and so Edward inhabits it, rather than taking aim at it. Even if he lived in a more hospitable world, however, it is hard to tell what satirical comment Edward would have to make, because the movie makes an abrupt switch in his character about two-thirds of the way through. Until then he's been a gentle, goofy soul, a quixotic outsider. Then Burton and his writer, Caroline Thompson, go on autopilot and paste in a standard Hollywood ending.
You know what that is. The hero and the villain meet, there is a deadly confrontation, and no prizes for guessing who wins. Except in pure action films, situations used to be solved by dialogue and plot developments. No more. Now someone is killed, and that's the solution, and the movie is over. In "Edward Scissorhands," the villain is a neighborhood lout named Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), who doesn't like guys with scissors for hands, and picks on Edward until finally there is a trumped-up fight to the finish up at the castle. This conclusion is so lame it's disheartening. Surely anyone clever enough to dream up Edward Scissorhands should be swift enough to think of a payoff that involves our imagination.
All of Burton's movies look great. "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" was an unalloyed visual delight, and so was "Beetlejuice," and "Batman" gave us a Gotham City that was one of the most original and atmospheric places I've seen in the movies. But shouldn't there be something more? Some attempt to make the characters more than caricatures? All of the central characters in a Burton film - Pee-wee, the demon Betelgeuse, Batman, the Joker or Edward Scissorhands - exist in personality vacuums; they're self-contained oddities with no connection to the real world. It's saying something about a director's work when the most well-rounded and socialized hero in any of his films is Pee-wee Herman.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Auszeichnungen

1991 Nominierung Academy Award (Oscar Best Makeup) Ve Neill, Stan Winston
1992 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films (Saturn Award Best Fantasy Film)
1992 BAFTA Film Award (Best Production Design) Bo Welch
1992 Nominierung BAFTA Film Award (Best Costume Design) Colleen Atwood
1992 Nominierung BAFTA Film Award (Best Make Up Artist) Ve Neill
1992 Nominierung BAFTA Film Award (Best Special Visual Effects) Stan Winston
1991 Nominierung Golden Globe (Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical) Johnny Depp
1991 Hugo Award (Best Dramatic Presentation)