director
Tim Burton
screenwriters
Scott Alexander
Larry Karaszewski
based on
the book
Nightmare of Ecstasy by
Rudolph
Grey
producers
Tim Burton
Denise Di Novi
cinematographer
Stefan Czapsky
music
Howard Shore
editor
Chris Lebenzon
cast
Johnny Depp (Edward D. Wood, Jr.)
Martin Landau (Bela Lugosi)
Sarah Jessica Parker (Dolores Fuller)
Patricia Arquette (Kathy O'Hara)
Jeffrey Jones (Criswell)
G.D. Spradlin (Reverend Lemon)
Vincent D'Onofrio (Orson Welles)
Bill Murray (Bunny Breckenridge)
Mike Starr (George Weiss)
Max Casella (Paul Marco)
Brent Hinkley (Conrad Brooks)
Lisa Marie (Vampira)
George 'The Animal' Steele (Tor Johnson)
Juliet Landau (Loretta King)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 127m
u.s.
release: September
28, 1994
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other tim
burton films
reviewed on this website:
- big
fish
- charlie
and the chocolate factory
- corpse
bride
- mars
attacks!
- planet
of the apes (2001)
- sleepy
hollow
see also:
- man
on the moon
- the
people vs. larry flynt
|
Probably
no director -- not even Hitchcock -- compels more affectionate
devotion than does Edward D. Wood, Jr. A cult icon before his
time (he died, destitute and alcoholic, in 1978 at the age of
54), Ed Wood wrote and directed some of the most outlandish movies
ever made: Glen or Glenda?, Bride of the Monster,
Night of the Ghouls, and the immortal Plan 9 from Outer
Space -- a film nobody who's seen it can talk about without
giggling and highly recommending it. Having seen some of Wood's
output, I think his movies are certainly bad, but not really
"the worst films ever made" -- a condescending label.
What sets Wood's bad movies apart from other bad movies of their
time (and there were many in the '50s) is that they're so surreal,
so earnestly didactic, and so innocently unaware of their own
badness that they're more entertaining than nine out of ten movies
made with the necessary time, money, and talent.
If Wood had been a boring man in private life, he might today
be a completely obscure figure -- like Phil Tucker, director
of Robot Monster, a 3-D turkey that's at least as laughable
as Plan 9. Wood, however, had definite quirks. Aside from
the above-mentioned alcoholism (which got worse as his post-Plan
9 career bottomed out), Wood enjoyed dressing in women's
clothes, favoring angora in particular. Legend has it that Wood,
a decorated World War II vet, was terrified of being shot down:
he didn't want the medics finding the silky underthings he wore
under his uniform. Wood was a misfit and an outsider, the classic
"misunderstood" figure, and his movies, chowderheaded
as they are, argue fervently for tolerance of those who differ
from the "norm." If you look at Wood's debut, Glen
or Glenda?, you'll laugh your ass off, but you may also be
saddened: This ridiculous plea for compassion was genuinely the
best he could do; this man with so much on his mind and in his
heart had so little talent to express it.
Ed Wood is an ambiguous figure of fun. It's easy to laugh at
his movies, but it's tough to laugh at him: His is the
depressing story of a man whose reach always exceeded his grasp.
In Ed Wood, the new film directed by Tim Burton, Wood
is presented as a go-getter who may have moved heaven and earth
to make piddly little movies everyone laughs at, but, hey, at
least he got them made. Stylistically, this is the least daring
movie Burton has yet made (though his insistence on filming in
black and white is courageous); it certainly doesn't risk the
excesses of Wood's films. Burton sticks with lush, basic, unfussy
images throughout. Obviously, he identifies with Wood the obsessed,
misunderstood filmmaker, and Wood takes a place in Burton's gallery
of misfits alongside Pee-wee, the hapless ghosts in Beetlejuice,
Bruce Wayne, Edward Scissorhands, and Jack Skellington. Yet Wood
doesn't really fit in there, either.
As played by Johnny Depp, Wood has a smile for everyone and hardly
ever loses his temper. He's a sweet guy with a deep soul -- if
only anyone were sensitive enough to see it. This harmless-creative-martyr
aspect of Burton's work -- James Dean as van Gogh -- almost wrecked
Edward Scissorhands, and it drains out much of what should
be striking in Ed Wood. This isn't Depp's fault. After
a string of hazy slacker roles, he comes through with a clear-eyed,
firm-handshake performance, and it's fun to see him so vibrant.
Depp doesn't have Wood's bland, lumpen Errol Flynn handsomeness;
his features are more delicate, and sometimes he uses them to
great comic effect -- he employs a wonderful fixed grin of nervousness
(it's meant to be a confident, reassuring smile) whenever someone
gives Wood a reality slap. Ed Wood has abundant affection
for its subject, and Depp is finally trapped by that affection.
He can't make Wood much more than a nice guy.
We know from reading Rudolph Grey's book Nightmare of Ecstasy
(a collection of anecdotes from Wood's friends and associates,
upon which Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander based their
screenplay), and from watching the documentary Ed Wood: Look
Back in Angora (now out on Rhino Video), that most everyone
who knew Wood considered him, yes, a nice guy, but also a little
strange and more than a little self-destructive. Burton's Ed
Wood is a sanitized view of Wood's most fertile period (the
mid- to late-'50s), and it's most enjoyable when Burton recreates
the cardboard sets Wood filmed on; the movie at its best is a
loving ode to moviemaking fever. Yet from this film, you'd think
Wood was only interested in monsters and angora. He also had
a sensationalistic streak a mile wide, and some of his lesser-known
films, which he either wrote or directed, have titles like Jail
Bait and Orgy of the Dead and The Violent Years
(about an all-girl gang) and The Sinister Urge (about
the evils of pornography).
Wood was caught in his own low-rent obsessions; they're the source
of his enduring appeal -- his cheesy style is linked to his choice
of subject matter -- but they also make his movies both funny
and sad. His obsessions, which were definitely '50s-sexist, appear
in one form or another in all his films but not particularly
in Ed Wood. Burton's Wood is a gentleman who, we think,
would never go on to direct and even appear in chintzy soft-core
bondage movies (as the actual Wood did -- the footage in Look
Back in Angora of a drunk and bloated Wood grovelling on
the floor before buxom women is unbearably depressing). Probably
with the best and kindest intentions, Burton gives us a Wood
who never was. It's refreshing to see Burton in a relatively
upbeat mood, but he picked the wrong story to give an optimistic
spin.
Ed Wood does have an outlaw soul, but it has nothing to
do with Wood, Burton, or Depp. Scraping for money to fund Glen
or Glenda?, Wood meets the legendary Bela Lugosi (Martin
Landau), now a decrepit, all-but-forgotten morphine addict. Lugosi's
involvement greases the wheels for three Wood movies, only one
of which actually used Lugosi as a legitimate character. (Wood
shot footage of Lugosi that he eventually used, after Lugosi's
death, for Plan 9; for long shots, Wood used a cloaked
chiropractor two feet taller than Lugosi.) Were Wood and Lugosi
exploiting each other -- Wood for Lugosi's dimmed star power,
Lugosi for a chance to act again (and the money to buy morphine)?
To his credit, Burton allows that the Wood-Lugosi relationship
began as mutual exploitation, but then he lets it deepen, and
their odd friendship -- two outcasts clinging to each other --
is the real core of Ed Wood.
Raging against Hollywood, his rival Boris Karloff, his age and
obsolescence, everything his life has become, Bela Lugosi is
a great tragicomic character -- the kind of character Burton
should have allowed Wood to be. Wisely, Burton lets Martin Landau
take over the middle section of the film. Landau gives what I'm
tempted to call the performance of his life (though he was equally
powerful in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Tucker).
In general, he refuses to soften or sentimentalize Lugosi (which
may upset Lugosi's fans); he's not afraid to be pathetic, abrasive,
and hammy. It's a fully rounded performance, almost Shakespearean
in its extremes of emotion and rhetoric (his profane swipes at
Karloff are wonderful). The scene of Lugosi delivering his corny
Bride of the Monster speech on the sidewalk will go down
as a cult-classic movie moment. Landau unleashes the inane monologue,
flooding it with conviction and passion that cut right through
the mawkishness of the scene (which is meant to sadden us with
the irony of Lugosi's rediscovering his actor's zeal just before
he dies).
Tim Burton has many gifts, but telling the truth isn't one of
them. That's what makes him a great fantasist. Taking
off with invented characters -- either his own (Edward Scissorhands)
or others' (Pee-wee, Batman) -- Burton can spin webs of metaphor,
phantom images that get around our rational minds and plug into
our sloppy, masochistic feelings of being alone and misunderstood.
Ed Wood doesn't give him many images to conjure with,
and the movie's tone is wobbly and jokey yet reverent. Wood is
probably the first (and, let's hope, the only) character Burton
has ever had to tone down to fit his design. This subject and
this director are not a good match, despite the surface similarities,
and Wood's complexity as a person -- his messy, contradictory,
wild inner life -- resists Burton's efforts to play it safe.
Wood himself would have loved Ed Wood. That's what's wrong
with it. |