Oeuvre: Tim Burton - Ed Wood

Ed Wood is Tim Burton's Schindler's List.  There.  I said it.

Lets dive right in, shall we?  In the early 50's, a young filmmaker named Ed struggles to make movies by any means necessary.  Undeterred by repeat failures, he is convinced his luck has changed when he meets the once great, now forgotten horror star, Bela Lugosi.  Together, the pair make some of the worst films of all time.

There are two types of Ed Wood fans; those who discovered his objectively terrible films on their own, and those who discovered him through this film.  Some are the former.  Most are the latter. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

The film shows considerable maturity for Burton.  Saddled with the responsibility of telling the story of a real person's life, Burton stays away from the stop-motion animation and gothic imagery that has defined his career up to this point.  Instead, he makes a film "the Ed Wood way."  The production design by Tom Duffield recreates Wood's reality in painstaking detail and the black and white cinematography by Stefan Czapsky captures it beautifully.  You're not just in Ed's world, you see it from his eyes.

They say we love characters for trying more than for their success.  Ed may be the poster child for that ideal.  The screenplay written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, based on the book by Rudolph Grey certainly thinks so.  We're always in Wood's corner.  We cringe as he gets knocked down and we cheer for him each and every time he gets back up.

The film boasts an impressive cast including Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray (who regrettably has never appeared in another Burton film) and a delightful cameo by Vincent D'Onofrio and Maurice LaMarche simultaneously as Orson Welles.

Martin Landau is magnetic as the foul-mouthed Hungarian.  His relationship with Ed, as they grow from idolized admiration to mutual appreciation, is tragically beautiful.  Both are striving for respect and legacy.  Wood, for a respect he has never achieved and Lugosi for a respect he once possessed.  Never meet your heroes, kids.

But the real star of the film is Johnny Depp as the titular Ed Wood in what may be the finest performance of his career (not counting Captain Jack in Pirates 1).  He imbues the character with delicate sensitivity.  He looks at everything and everyone with the energetic wonder of a child.  Watching Depp going over dailies of Lugosi stumbling through a scene, you'd think he was watching the second coming of Christ.  He has no self-critic, no voice in his head asking if what he's making is total shit.  He can't afford it.

Ed surrounds himself with failures, not to prop himself up, but because nobody of substance would agree to work with him.  They become his friends, compatriots, and accomplices as he passionately convinces them to steal giant, robotic squids and get baptized in a swimming pool.  And when Wood reveals himself as a transvestite, very risqué back then, they embrace him with loving arms, laughing with him.  They form a loyal circus group of badness that you want to join.

Ed Wood has had a hard time finding its crowd.  Its the film that most casual Tim Burton fans, I'm talking about the Hot Topic crowd here, seem to have missed.  Whereas, more serious cinefiles, those who stick up their noses at Batman or Sleepy Hollow, praise as his best.  Whichever way you look at it, whichever camp you find yourself in, its certainly a gem.

Under the care of almost any other director or written by any other screenwriter, this story could be nothing more than a series of potshots at the character but that's not the case here.  Sure, there are more than a few jabs at the hapless filmmaker and his crew, but at its heart, this is a story about determination and pursuit of one's dreams.  The film is never cruel.  Rather, its filled with admiration and respect for a man who was a terrible artist, but was still a man, with hopes and dreams, who made friends and watched people die.  He felt love and he felt heartache.  In that way, Ed Wood is one of the most human films I've ever seen.

Despite being critically well received and winning several Academy Awards, the film was a box office flop.  No accounting for taste, I suppose.  Check it out, immediately.