Hooray For Hollywood

Rating: 9/10 (9 December 2014)

"Ed Wood" is about as good as Hollywood gets while perversely celebrating the worst Hollywood has ever offered. Forsaking grim reality for the Hollywood kind, it tells an involving story with a deft mix of humor and heart.
Wood (Johnny Depp) is a struggling writer of bad dinner-theater drama who dreams of finding success on the big screen. One day he spots boyhood idol Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) inside a coffin he's testing out for a road-tour production of "Dracula." Lugosi, who has seen better days, takes up Ed's offer of a ride home. Soon, he is signed to be in Wood's movie about a cross-dresser. The movie predictably fails, but Wood and Lugosi become unlikely friends in the face of uncaring Hollywood.
Wood at least can handle criticism, having practice: "Worst film you ever saw? Well, my next one will be better!"
There is a lot of room for pathos here, and even more if "Ed Wood" stuck more closely to the facts. The film is a triumph precisely because it plays with the truth in such a genial, gonzo way. Wood in the film is not the dysfunctional alcoholic he was in life but a highly motivated young man bursting with energy. He has a gift for making friends, strange friends but good ones, like TV psychic Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), horror-movie MC Vampira (Lisa Marie), and out-of-work-and-out-of-the-closet actor Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray).
Murray alone has so many funny lines in this film I could fill the rest of this review with them and be done. There are a lot of funny lines in this film, some buried so deep you have to watch it more than once. I just caught one, where the owner of the coffin shop responds to Lugosi's complaint ("Too constricting!") by earnestly saying no one has ever mentioned it before.
Because the film is in black-and-white, it seems to go by people, which is unfortunate. Director Tim Burton and co-writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski present us with a very accessible story that includes clever shout-outs to bad-movie buffs, not just hilarious re- enactments of terrible scenes from Ed Wood's own movies but left-field moments where Ed is inspired to write lines that will become famous in his movies ("Pull the strings...wait a minute!")
I'm not a fan of the cast, with the exception of Murray and Landau, but all do great work here. Depp's artificiality in the title performance initially put me off; then I realized he was playing off the conventions of the 1950s in a way that sets the tone for the whole movie. Sarah Jessica Parker is an actress I can't stand, but she's fantastic here as Wood's girlfriend Delores, the one person who sees how bad his movies are and can't stand it. Her facial reactions when listening to two of Wood's disciples sing his praises are priceless.
Watching "Ed Wood" may be tough for five minutes if you aren't used to black-and-white movies, but that will disappear once Landau makes his entrance. The film just builds from there; it's structurally as strong as it is quotable. The humor makes it enjoyable; the compassion makes it memorable. "Ed Wood" is a rare movie that can be treasured as easily as it can be enjoyed.