ED WOOD
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray. Screenplay: Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Director: Tim Burton.
It's hard to imagine a more unlikely subject for a film biography than Edward D. Wood Jr. When I think of bio-pics, I think GANDHI, MY LEFT FOOT, MALCOLM X--epic tales of great and inspirational figures. The director of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE does not seem to be cut from quite the same cloth. The great surprise of ED WOOD is that in his own unique and twisted way, director Tim Burton has turned one of the worst filmmakers of all time into one of those inspirational figures. Rather than holding Wood up to ridicule, Burton makes his life an example of artistic integrity, an extremely entertaining look at an auteur unlike any other.
Johnny Depp stars as Ed Wood, who is a playwright, studio hand and would-be filmmaker when our story begins. Ed sees his chance for a big break in a planned screen biography of transsexual Christine Jorgensen, which Ed thinks he's perfect for because of his own closet fetish for women's clothing. He is also able to deliver a "big star" for the production: Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau), now nearly destitute and addicted to morphine. With Lugosi and girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), Ed makes GLEN OR GLENDA?, a phenomenally incompetent melodrama. But Ed is undaunted by the ridicule of others, and forges ahead to make more films, as well as forging a friendship with the ailing Lugosi. Eventually comes Ed Wood's magnum opus: the infamous PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.
Burton based his vision for ED WOOD on one question: what if someone had all the drive of Orson Welles, but none of the talent? That question, and its answer, are what make Edward D. Wood Jr.'s story a comedy rather than a tragedy. Johnny Depp plays Ed Wood with a kind of childlike awe in the mere fact that he is able to make films, and his mantra of "Perfect!" after every clumsy take becomes not simply a paradigm for self-delusion, but a reminder that sometimes process is as important to art as product. In one delightful scene, Ed runs into Orson Welles (a dubbed Vincent D'Onofrio) in a Hollywood bar. There they exchange stories about funding problems with their latest projects (PLAN 9 and the recently restored DON QUIXOTE, respectively). The sincerity with which Wood speaks to Welles as an equal, and his determination to stay true to his vision, make him anything but pathetic. He becomes a strangely heroic maverick, doing it his way even if it means doing it the wrong way.
Yet Burton manages to tell another story in ED WOOD, that of the curious friendship between Ed and Bela Lugosi. It is truly an example of mutual need--Wood needs Lugosi to lend his movies credibility; Lugosi needs Wood to give him work, any work--but it's also something even more touching. As played with eerie brilliance by Martin Landau, Lugosi is bitter, broke and depressive when Wood finds him in the late 1950s, and completely without respect. It is respect which is the greatest gift Ed gives him, and Laundau's portrayal of his slow return to humanity is one of the finest pieces of acting this year.
It is ED WOOD's niftiest accomplishment that it links these two stories so effortlessly. Ed Wood's uniquely wonderful naivete comes from the fact that he never fully grasps that Hollywood was a business first. He is unable to understand how Lugosi could be unable to find work, because to Ed, his talent is all that should matter. Even through fund-raising parties and creative recruiting of backers for his films, it's not about the money to Edward D. Wood Jr. It's about art.
ED WOOD is occasionally quite slow-moving, and loses much of its steam in its final twenty minutes. The making of PLAN 9 seems to deserve more than a montage, and Ed's relationship with wife-to-be Kathy (Patricia Arquette) is given only a cursory treatment. But the affection in Burton's telling of this tale is infectious, and makes one wish more talented contemporary filmmakers were as relentlessly individual.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 golden turkeys: 8.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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