Sunday, June 3, 2012

Praise for a Forgotten Tim Burton/Johnny Depp Collaboration: Ed Wood


Bring out the freaks!  Only director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp could make the peculiar story of the freakish worst director in American history not only watchable, but clever and exuberant as well.  Ed Wood may have been a weirdo who liked to wear ladies clothes, which he sometimes wore on set, but as portrayed here bravely by Johnny Depp, he was a rather excitable little fellow whose huge dreams were undermined by his terrific lack of talent, yet he never let that deter him from trying!  There’s a very interesting scene in this movie where he meets and has a short conversation with Orson Welles (superbly played here in this single scene by Vincent D’Onofrio with a voice over by Maurice LaMarche), as the director of Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil converses with the director of Plan 9 From Outer Space and Bride of the Monster about their struggles with their creative visions and their dealings with the studio system.  The whole film is like this, melding the artistic with the ridiculous, and poor old Ed Wood doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference.  Ed Wood may have been one of the all-time worst cinematic ingénues, but Tim Burton is not, and crafts a very enjoyable film here about losers who don’t know it… yet.  At the height of their revelry in their bizarre exploits making films on the run with little to no financial backing, Wood takes his false teeth out and dances around in a cheap wig, angora sweater and veil, interrupted by his girlfriend screaming at them that they are all just a bunch of freaks celebrating nothing but their own eccentric strangeness and having lost their grip on reality.  Well, somebody needed to say it, and yet Wood continues, still rather oblivious to his own strangeness.  He takes another girl through the tunnel of love and admits to her he likes to wear women’s clothes, and when she asks if he likes girls, he says he loves girls, but that he also likes to wear women’s clothes, and she’s okay with it!  I guess it takes all kinds.
     In the midst of all of this, Wood also finds famed horror movie icon Bela Lugosi, washed up and addicted to heroin.  Martin Landau brings real life to this tragic portrait of a discarded, once famous screen actor who fell by the wayside, and some of the charm of this picture is how he buys into Wood’s delusions of grandeur simply because Wood himself was so enamored of this classic star he had found.
     From commanding performances on stage and screen in a string of strong Universal horror films and his iconic Dracula, Wood happens across him long after all these accolades have faded, and through Landau’s wonderful performance, one can see that there was still something there within old Bela yet, spouting Wood’s ridiculously silly dialogue as if it were genius and managing to wring some pathos out of the material.  Landau turns this old, washed up boogie man into a truly tragic character.
     Now this film is not an epic (to its benefit), but what I really like about it is that it still manages to bring some real meaning out of this story of the worst director of all time, and makes it an entertaining romp to boot, and I might just mention that the black and white cinematography, the music, and the editing here are as first rate as the performances of Depp and Landau.  
     This film about Ed Wood was somewhat of an experiment in opposites.  Ed Wood was a loser, and quite the weirdo, and his movies were terrible, but this biopic of him by Tim Burton, with one of Johnny Depp’s better performances, was far, far from being as terrible as Wood's movies were.  It was one of the best films about one of the worst artists ever to hit Hollywood.

No comments:

Post a Comment