KITSCH AS KITSCH CAN

By David Ansen

From Newsweek, vol 124 n 15, 10.10.1994

A sad, funny salute to the master of ineptitude

Edward D. Wood Jr., a writer-director who inhabited the outermost margins of Hollywood, died in alcoholic obscurity in 1978. Soon after, he was rediscovered by connoisseurs of kitsch and semiofficially dubbed "the worst director of all time" for such grade-Z '50s epics as Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. The latter, a bizarre cri de coeur, was a plea for compassion for transvestism in which the director--a heterosexual cross-dresser with a serious angora fetish -- appeared in drag as the doubly eponymous hero. The singular nuttiness of that 1953 film--far ahead of its time in content--comes from its mind-bogglingly random shifts between pseudodocumentary earnestness and gothic delirium. The passion of the film is as undeniable as its ineptitude; that potent combination gives it its distinctively unhinged Woodsy flavor.

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 Orson 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 Glenda 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.