The one and only Time Machine

Rating: 10/10 (20 February 2006)

There has been an Ed Wood DVD box on the French market for a few months now, including Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Why are these films considered as the worst ever made in Hollywood (or elsewhere) is beyond my understanding. They are very awkward ; the acting is stiff and mostly unprofessional ; and still they do convey  especially Glen or Glenda and Plan 9  an eerie feeling of metaphysical dereliction  the dreadfully lonely scene with the old widower in Plan 9 is outstanding in an odd way.
*** Spoilers*** I bought the box, and a few days ago I landed up with Tim Burton's Ed Wood. Ed Wood is an outstanding film, showing, of course, none of the awkwardness of Ed Wood's own creations. The cast is wonderful (Depp, Landau, Lisa Marie, Jeffrey Jones especially), the direction is so precise and subtle it lets you savor the taste of good bad cinema without a single sneer ; the music is grand (Theremin be thanked !). And there is more to it  a perfect reflection of the sad, bleached light that irradiates Ed Wood's own films, (if nothing else could). The scene of the old widower now gets a poignant explanation  Depp-Wood stages it without even having a film in his mind, just to reassure poor old dying Landau-Lugosi. Well, he might well have less altruistic motives, but what do we care ? Wood records the frail gait, the trembling hand, the white light reverberating on the shabby suburban home. That is the sequence that shimmers with such melancholy in Ed Wood's real own Plan 9. No wonder : death looms large. I love the fact that Burton includes this very same sequence in Ed Wood, with an ecstatic Depp lip-sync-hing the scene  who mirrors who now ? Isn't Ed Wood, the man, a Burton creation, after all ; or isn't Ed Wood the film time-teleported directly from the fifties to your screen ? Who knows ? It takes the slightly too familiar faces of Bill Murray and Sarah Jessica Parker to steal you from this ravishing time wrap (Landau's and Depp's should be as familiar : but they're far greater actors, aren't they ?). Alas, you are not lost in the black and white land of your wildest dreams and there's a way back home.
*** An other spoiler, and a puzzle*** A word about Orson Welles' uncanny apparition. The smooth-skinned, handsome Welles you see here is a thing of wonder  so like Kane's Welles that the mind boggles ; but then : how can he be filming Touch of Evil ? And that, my friends, is one of Ed Wood's (the film, the man) greatest and most devastatingly naive ideas.