Tim Burton’s sweet, sad and very funny Ed Wood takes its cue from that passion. It’s a valentine to the tenacious spirit of an artist who will do anything to see his vision realized on screen. But this would-be Or-son Welles’s vision is, unfortunately, unredeemed by talent. He pronounces every take he shoots “perfect,” no matter if the acting is hopelessly rank, the special effects straight from the five and dime. It would be easy to turn Ed Wood’s strange life into a condescending freak show. Instead, Burton and his screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, reinvent Wood as a sibling of Burton’s other outcast innocent heroes–he’s as single-minded as Pee-wee chasing his bicycle, as unearthly as Ed Scissorhands. Johnny Depp, brimming with deluded can-do brio, plays Wood as a holy huckster, a cockeyed optimist with a “hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” spirit right out of Andy Hardy. Though this is the first Burton film from a true story (based on Rudolph Grey’s oral history “Nightmare of Ecstasy”), Burton’s no more interested in the real world than he ever was. “Ed Wood’s” Hollywood, poetically evoked in Stefan Czapsky’s black-and-white images, is only slightly less a dream than “Batman’s” Gotham City. But it’s a giddier dream, emotionally closer to home.
The movie follows Wood through his benighted struggles to make “Glen or Glenrio” and “Plan 9,” stopping before his decline into booze and soft-core skinflicks. Narrative is not the point here; nor does Burton care to psychoanalyze his subject. Though most of the facts are accurate, his Ed Wood is more metaphor than man, a Pied Piper in angora who presides over the creation of an oddball alternative family made up of the most outre inhabitants of Hollywood. Wood befriended and employed Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) when the drug-addicted horror star was down and out, and their relationship is the heart of the movie. Landau’s Lugosi is a towering, touching creation–a hilarious, pathetic, imperious old pro, imprisoned by opiates and his “Dracula” persona, still gamely pursuing the limelight. It’s tempting to say that Landau does Lugosi better than Lugosi.
The whole motley Wood crew is here. There’s “Bunny” Breekinridge, a powdered queen who dreams of a sex-change operation, played by the wistfully funny Bill Murray. Jeffrey Jones uncannily captures the peroxided glory of fake TV seer Criswell. There’s Ed’s girlfriend and wooden leading lady, Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker, a vision of blond cheesiness), and Kathy, Wood’s wife, played with whispery delicacy by Patricia Arquette. There’s cranky late-night tube ghoul Vampira (Lisa Marie), the hulking wrestler turned actor Tor Johnson (George “The Animal” Steele) and “Bride of the Monster” star Loretta King (Juliet Landau, Martin’s daughter), who gets the part when she invests all her savings in the venture.
At the end, “Ed Wood” lifts off into fantasy: there’s an encounter with Orson Welles (eerily caught by Vincent D’Onofrio), and “Plan 9” gets a triumphant premiere at the Pantages Theatre, where Wood is granted a cinematic apotheosis in life that he got, backhandedly, only in death. Now he’s honored with this movie, a crazily entertaining celebration of his hapless career made with an artfulness he could only dream of possessing. The dizzy ironies of it all would have blown his already twisted mind.
