"It's all about razzle-dazzle"

Rating: 9/10 (17 January 2012)

The mighty epics and incisive dramas of the 1950s should be well-known to anyone with a cursory interest in classic cinema, but now less familiar are the numerous B-movies that formed a teaming if slightly seedy underbelly to Hollywood's grandiosity. The movies may have been cheap and shoddy affairs, but that doesn't mean there weren't behind-the-scenes stories that were just as fascinating as the juiciest tidbits of A-list gossip. Here we see a celebration of one of the B-flick's unsung heroes, the great Edward D. Wood Junior.
The project was given, very appropriately, to that champion of B-movie chic Tim Burton. As a film director, Tim Burton is far from the best, but he had a certain kind of genius that could shine through in the right project. For Ed Wood, he seeks very much to immerse us in the eponymous filmmaker's world. When, for example, Dolores notes that her sweaters are always stretched and Eddie turns over with a guilty look, we are suddenly sharing that private space between him and the camera. Many scenes are shot from a low angle, such as when Wood first meets Lugosi, which reduces the image to the actors' heads, the sky and the odd signpost. It creates a very surreal image, with very little to tie it into the real world. Nothing normal is allowed to steal into the frame. Burton also stages a lot of the scenes with a certain sense of occasion, as in Lugosi's final speech or Wood's entrance in women's clothing – these events are given an air of grand theatricality. This is Wood's world – only seeing the glamour.
Actors don't often get the chance to ham it up in modern cinema, but even though Ed Wood is about real historical personages, these individuals – Bela Lugosi, Criswell, Bunny Breckinridge and of course Mr Wood himself – were hugely flamboyant figures, and besides, the world in which Ed Wood takes place is somewhat hyper-real. Johnny Depp demonstrates his magnificent ability to walk the line between drama and comedy, giving the title character a boyish charm that makes us forget how atypical he is for a lead. Martin Landau plays Bela Lugosi as a ham who hammed even when he wasn't in front of the camera, showing the old horror legend as larger-than-life but also painstakingly human. Bill Murray and Jeffrey Jones play similarly oddball characters, and just have fun with the opportunity to chew up the scenery and still remain faithful to the actual people they are portraying.
In Ed Wood Burton, along with writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski make Wood's movies look better than they actually were. And Landau makes Lugosi seem like a better actor than he really was (at least, as he was at that forlorn stage in his career). While little that appears here is outright fabrication, the facts have been dressed up, exaggerated, just as Wood might have done himself. And this is all fair enough in the spirit of the thing. After all, Ed Wood doesn't seem to be a document of how things actually were, but of how we should like to remember them.