ED WOOD
A film review by Mike Church
Copyright 1995 Mike Church
The story: The film is a loosely biographical look at the life of Ed Wood (duh), the maker of truly terrible films such as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and GLEN OR GLENDA. Wood is shown to be a person desperate to live up to the image of his idol, Orson Wells, who wrote, directed, and starred in CITIZEN KANE in his late 20's. Unfortunately, Wood appears to have several handicaps as a filmmaker: he has very little talent, no connections within the movie industry, and no money. In his favour he has enormous enthusiasm, massive confidence, support from friends (such as Bela Lugosi, the legendary ex-Dracula, fantastically portrayed here by Martin Landau) and his girlfriend. He's also a great bullshitter.
The films he makes are hampered by his scripts, the actors he hires, the meddling of his financial backers (in some cases, he gets money for the movie in exchange for letting the donor play a key role), and lack of quality control: scene after scene is showed being shot with disastrous flaws, and in each case Wood calls "Cut! Perfect, print it," never once calling for a second take. The result is a batch of truly awful Ed Wood films.
Johnny Depp strikes me as the kind of actor that some people love and others hate. Having seen him in BENNY & JOON and WHAT'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE, I like him a lot. His work in title role of ED WOOD is great: he does a terrific job of playing this hack moviemaker with compassion and style. He does not play "Johnny Depp;" in other words, he plays each of his roles very differently. He gives Ed Wood energy, charisma, warmth, and vulnerability, but doesn't prevent you from believing that his character is fundamentally handicapped as a filmmaker. Martin Landau does an unbelievable job of playing Bela Lugosi, now well past the end of his career and a junkie. Despite the major roles played by these two actors, there is no sense of one trying to upstage the other; rather, they reinforce each other--perhaps at the expense of the other actors, none of whom made any great impression on me. Even Bill Murray, who I normally find very charismatic, seems firmly in the back seat in this movie.
Still, the movie kinda bummed me out. I got the same feeling from BATMAN, another film directed by Tim Burton, so maybe it's his fault. Despite having some laughs written into it, the movie wasn't very much fun. Wood obviously had a shitty life, desperately trying to re-live Orson Wells' life, and the point of the movie seemed to be to jeer at Ed Wood for not being able to fulfill his dream. He bounced perkily through his life making one crappy movie after another, always a day late and a dollar short (Tom Waits) and clearly going nowhere. As if showing Wood to be a blinkered, talentless (but likeable) geek weren't enough, Burton spends way too much time and footage on his subject's closet transvestitism, which starts out funny and ends up looking like a long series of cheap shots.
But: the movie oozes style, from the fantastic opening titles (a parody of all the B movie openings you've ever seen) through the all-black&white production, with its wonderful camera work (alternating classic B movie "what-is-he-thinking" ultra-closeup face shots with fantastic helicopter pans blending seamlessly into flawless miniature sets) to the "where are they now" closing credits. Speaking of the latter, again it was pretty depressing to find out what happened to some of these actors--very little good news here.
Rating: if you liked BATMAN, don't mind admitting that you had fun watching B movies before you got old and sophisticated, and are on the right side of the like/hate Johnny Depp fence, you'd happily give this movie $7.50 on the unattainable $8.00 scale. If you wouldn't be caught dead eating popcorn in the same room as Godzilla and a miniature disintegrating Tokyo, or if you found BATMAN irredeemably gloomy, you probably won't find much to like here either--say $2.50's worth. I'd give it a solid $4.00, with a $.50 bonus for having no gunfire, car chases, or helicopter battles, which means that I once again got my money's worth from the Ridge.
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