“This is the one. This
is the one I’ll be remembered for.”
Ed Wood (1994);
directed by Tim Burton; written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, based
on the book Nightmare of Ecstasy by
Rudolph Grey; produced by Tim Burton and Denise Di Novi; music by Howard Shore;
cinematography by Stefan Czapsky; editing by Chris Lebenzon; distributed by
Touchstone Pictures; Awards: Best Supporting Actor: Martin Landau; Best
Make-Up: Rick Baker, Ve Neill, Yolanda Toussieng; for a full list of awards and
nominations, go here.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Ed Wood
(1924-1978) directed some of the most inept films ever to grace television
broadcasts. If you grew up in the
Sixties and early Seventies, as Tim Burton did, you probably saw some of them
on the “schlock-shock theaters” that showed B-grade and below movies as
Saturday matinees and late night insomniac broadcasts. Wood’s films—the most famous is Plan Nine from Outer Space (1956), the
most notorious is Glen or Glenda
(1953)—were so spectacularly silly that they attained cult status and drew
kudos from those who loved to mock them.
Wood, we might suppose, is an unlikely subject for a biopic, though we
might also imagine that such a film, if playing it straight, might contain some
pathos, as there is perhaps none so sad as he who thinks he’s great, and isn’t. Tim Burton’s film is not the life of Wood; it
is a stylized treatment of Wood (Johnny Depp) that draws upon some of the DIY
auteur’s cinematic style to deliver a portrait of a kind that an Andy Warhol
would understand: an imitation, a pop-fantasy, a paean to kitsch and cliché
and visionary incompetence.
Shot in black and white, with a great score by Howard Shore,
the film is one of Burton’s most unique; it’s also fairly brave of him, and
dates from the era before his long slide into bad revisions from other sources that began just after the turn of the century
(Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, etc). Ed Wood
is a film about loving films, no matter how bad they are, and Burton’s loving
recreations of Wood’s methods are priceless—as when we watch Béla
Lugosi (Martin Landau), then Tor Johnson (George “The Animal” Steele) walk
across a flimsy set, making the same gestures to mime grief, and responding to
Wood’s prompt: “You want to keep moving. You have to get through that
door.” Johnson almost doesn’t get
through the door, colliding with the wall and making the set shake. That shot remains in Wood’s film. And the sequence of Lugosi wrestling a fake
octopus with no motor is top notch, as is Ed and Béla watching a Creature Feature together on Halloween.
Wood, as played by Johnny Depp, is the ultimate naif, and
Depp makes all of his character’s oddity likeable and homey. Wood liked to wear women’s clothing, finding
comfort in the textures, particularly angora, and one scene where he reveals
his predilection to his girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker) is
done as a do-or-die moment of self-revelation; later, after Dolores leaves him,
Wood reveals his fetish to his new girlfriend, Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette)
in a stalled funhouse. The setting has
the cartoonishness of most of Burton’s efforts at creepiness, giving us a feel
for the funhouse origins of his sense of style.
Kathy has no problem with Wood’s tendencies and they live happily ever
after as a couple.
As a director, Wood finds himself up against one set-back
after another. His doggedness is
inspiring in some ways—and some of his efforts recall those of John Waters,
another cult director with a love of the kitschy, the trashy, the garish and
the weird. Wood, in real life, never
attained the skill of Waters, but, for the purposes of Ed Wood, we can almost pretend he did. The screenwriters give Wood a great scene
during the filming of Plan 9: Wood,
annoyed with the intrusions of his financial backers, stalks off the set and
goes to a bar. Who should be slumped in
a booth but Orson Welles himself! Played
with an earnest scowl and a dubbed voice by Vincent Donofrio, Welles bucks Wood
up by telling him of the problems he faces in making his own films. It’s a moment of savvy film awareness.
Welles, generally hailed as a genius as a film-maker, faced all kinds of difficulties
and disasters in getting money for his projects and in bringing them off
according to his intentions. The film
industry, we see, is a hurdle for the driven originals in the field, for the
likes of visionaries like Welles and Wood!
As wry as that little jab is, there is great affection
behind it too—and both sentiments inspire the portrayal of Béla
Lugosi, an Oscar-winning role for Martin Landau (the make-up for the role also
earned Rick Baker and his team Oscars as well). Lugosi is depicted as in his last gasps as an actor, struggling with a
morphine habit and reduced to the dire straits that many has-beens find at
the end of their time. Lugosi was an
international icon thanks to his performance in Tod Browning’s Dracula, but most of his films are B-level
horror and suspense fodder. Burton’s film
gets a bit edgy in its depiction of the depths to which Lugosi has sunk (which is
mostly fictional but which gives the film much of its darkness), and what’s
remarkable is how comic and warm the scenes with Lugosi manage to be: Landau
infuses toughness, egotism, pathos, professionalism, friendliness, scariness, and
a very human humor into his Lugosi. It’s
truly a remarkable portrayal and sets the standard of the film To be good enough to accommodate Landau’s
Lugosi, the film has to be very good, and it is.
The interplay between Depp and Landau carries much of the
film, but there are many great supporting roles: Sarah Jessica Parker is
suitably brittle as the long-suffering Dolores, dumped from a prime role
because a supposed backer wants to play the part; Patricia Arquette is soulful
and devoted as Kathy; Bill Murray is a far cry from his glib wise-guy roles as
Bunny Breckenridge, a sad-sack queer who helps Ed find transvestites for Glen or Glenda and then plays “the
Leader” in Plan 9; Jeffrey Jones, one
of Burton’s recurring character actors, plays the charismatic Criswell, a
supposed psychic who provided voice-overs for some of Wood’s films (Wood often
shot with no sound or used stock footage)—Jones memorably opens the film in a
coffin, giving a mock warning to viewers about the shocking nature of the film
they’re about to see.
With atmosphere a-plenty, including great set work to create
a B-movie version of Hollywood, and great fun showing the rigors, the
compromises, the bathos and the camaraderie of film-making, with a sympathetic
glimpse of the difficult task of causing suspended disbelief (especially with
the money men), and with odd and memorable characters, especially an indelible
portrayal of an aged and ailing old movie star fallen into the dregs of
movie-making, Ed Wood is one of Tim
Burton’s least successful films (in box office returns) and one of his
best. That’s largely because of the
quality of the writing here, something Burton seems not to care about much once
he becomes an enormous box office draw. The film makes a point, in the context of films of the Nineties: the
schlock of Wood’s films is in part due to lack of professionals and lack of
budget; the high-grossing schlock that tops the charts in the Nineties and
after, which are largely little more than B-movies with budgets and know-how—and
Burton is among the culprits—has no such excuse.
50 Since 1970
1 comment:
Cut! That was perfect!
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