One-of-a-kind biopic might be Burton's best

Rating: 8/10 (7 July 2009)

It might forever be known as Tim Burton's most "normal" film, but that doesn't mean "Ed Wood" is your traditional biography. Burton's obsession with giving things other-worldly qualities simply takes on a different form as it tells the story of acclaimed "worst director of all time," Edward D. Wood Jr., played by Burton favorite Johnny Depp.
Wood was a forgettable B-movie director until his naming as the worst of all time a couple years after his death in the '70s gave him a cult following. Burton tells his story in a fitting black and white form that uses both B-movie and classic techniques (in addition to a score with some classic themes by Howard Shore) as an appropriate ode to the director. It's partly fascinating because you want to know why Wood was the worst and how someone who is the worst is motivated to make movies.
For the first time in Depp's career, he gets to really show what he's capable of in a leading role. Depp brings this naive charisma and desperation to make motion pictures however the heck he wants to Wood, who clearly had to have had a few screws loose to make the movies he made. Since Wood also took pleasure in dressing up in womens' clothes, particularly angora sweaters, this adds another quirky dimension to the film that most would recognize as more up Burton's alley. Depp plays those scenes with a silly modesty.
But the dimension that really makes this one of Burton's best films, if not the best, is the brilliant subplot of the relationship between Wood and horror icon Bela Lugosi played marvelously by Martin Landau. Lugosi was aging, getting senile and addicted to morphine when he met Wood and so Landau's performance is the most hysterical and touching of all the roles in the film. He's self-centered and curses a lot, but you can tell that making movies was his life too and how his time out of the spotlight crushed him emotionally. An Oscar much deserved.
With the feel of an old-time movie yet the insight of a modern one, "Ed Wood" is as unique a film as they come. Not quite comedy and not quite drama, it is both a satire of Hollywood and light-hearted examination of the business while also getting at what it takes to make movies and why people are so impassioned to do it. In a way, it's Burton's justification of his bizarre style of film-making, though in my opinion he need none.