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.
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