Tim Burton’s best film puts a happy face on the mostly sad life of Edward D. Wood Jr., but it does so for good reason. Wood, “the worst director of all-time”, who scraped and struggled for every movie he ever made, blossomed after his death into a pop culture icon and a constant source of fascination for fans of far-out flicks—and that’s something worth celebrating.
For the whole bleak and darkly comic story, read Nightmare of Ecstacy, Rudolph Grey’s totally fucking essential oral history of Wood and the weirdness that surrounded him. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski read the book—lived with the book, no doubt—and raided it for oddball anecdotes. They sifted through its sometimes contradictory accounts and took Wood’s side for their screenplay. The man’s been ridiculed enough, after all. Alexander and Karaszewski (and Burton, who claims that he shot their script as written without the usual thirty-seven Hollywood rewrites) depict Wood as a hero here, if not a new patron saint for put-upon outsiders. Johnny Depp plays the lead with a brilliant balance of cartoonish gestures and real humility. He takes a major risk, with Martin Landau alongside him as a washed-up, methadone-shooting, sad and funny Bela Lugosi (Landau rightfully won a truckload of awards for it, including an Oscar).
As far as I’m concerned, this is the film that Tim Burton was put on Earth to make. If those terrible Batman movies earned him the clout to get this little oddball made, they were worth it. A fan from childhood of old monster movies, Burton understands this world. He never condescends to it. He never strikes a false note. He even had the smarts (and the Hollywood pull) to shoot this in the stark black-and-white that it needs. It all adds up to a great Hollywood movie about a man who was rejected by Hollywood. That’s one of many bittersweet ironies in the story of Ed Wood.