"Ed Wood" has devilish fun revisiting the scenes of Wood's many cinematic crimes, depicting with glee and accuracy the horrible conditions under which his films were made. " 'The soldiers' costumes are very realistic,' " he exclaims early in the film, reading aloud the nicest line in a review of one of Wood's plays. He captures all the can-do optimism that kept Ed Wood going, thanks to an extremely funny ability to look at the silver lining of any cloud. Depp isn't best known as a comic actor, but he gives a witty and captivating performance, bringing wonderful buoyancy to this crazy role. There is, for instance, the moment when Ed Wood's girlfriend, Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), asks: "Where's my pink sweater? I can never seem to find my clothes any more." Angora-loving Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) says nothing but looks guiltily at the camera. So the biggest surprise about "Ed Wood" is that it manages to be a sweet, sunny mainstream comedy, with its kinkiness reduced to the level of a joke. Wood was also a dauntless guerrilla film maker, assembling his own band of outsiders as a stock company and using anything or anyone he could commandeer for the film-making process.Įd Wood eventually descended into terminal sleaze, drinking himself to death, writing books with titles like "Death of a Transvestite Hooker" and making hard-core porn like "Necromania," which depicts oral sex in a coffin. Ed Wood played that role himself, and he played it from the heart.Įven allowing for the special ineptitude of the Wood oeuvre, or for Wood's habit of turning up in full drag to do his directing, it would take more to explain Mr. He's best remembered for the transcendent tackiness of "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and for "Glen or Glenda," which achieved midnight movie notoriety for its story about a man who loved wearing angora sweaters.
He made the kind of science-fiction film that used Cadillac hubcaps for flying saucers. Two questions immediately present themselves: Who and why? To answer the first, Ed Wood was a director working on the outermost fringes of Hollywood in the 1950's. Wood Jr., as filtered through the dark wit and visual brilliance of Mr. So here is the Z-movie ethos of Edward D. Burton, currently Hollywood's most irrepressible maverick, has taken that credo to heart. Late in the film, Welles appears (played deftly by Vincent d'Onofrio, who really looks like him) to advise Wood that independence is everything and that an artist's visions are worth fighting for.
"Ed Wood," Tim Burton's very good film about a very bad film maker, has a cheerful defiance that would surely have appealed to Orson Welles, who was Ed Wood's hero.
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