I'm really not a Tim Burton guy.
There was a chunk of years there — between the ages of maybe 11 and 20 — where I really tried. I felt like I should be a Tim Burton guy. His stuff was weird, and I like weird. His stuff was dark (sort of), and I like dark. He was all about the classic horror movies, and I had a poster of Frankenstein's Monster on my wall when I was like eight. On paper, it all should have been there.
But there was always one big problem: the guy just doesn't really know how to tell a story. It's all about the imagery with him, the style, the essential "Tim Burton"-ness of it all. Characters, plot, theme, story logic...he treats all of that like baggage to be jettisoned. I know that I'm not breaking any new ground by saying this, but come on. You know it's true.
So even as a kid I just never could get as into his movies as I wanted to. "Beetlejuice" is fun for awhile, but all the silliness loses me toward the end. "Edward Scissorhands" ... meh. "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" ... nothing. His "Batman" was probably my favorite, but I never quite understood what all the fuss was about. End of the day his stuff just leaves me cold, and always did.
But.
There's always that one exception to prove the rule, right?
"Ed Wood" is, for my money, one of the absolute best films of the 1990s. So what is it that sets this one so far apart from the others?
The black-and-white helps, to be honest. It's a stylistic and some would say obvious choice, but it serves the purpose of reigning in some of Burton's most obnoxious and self-indulgent tendencies. He throws in a lot of his typical flourishes here, but somehow manages to keep it all on the right side of the line. As goofy as it is, the movie keeps its feet on the ground.
The acting is another thing. Johnny Depp is a brilliant actor in so many ways but he's prone to a lot of the same bad instincts, so I always feel like he and Burton are a dangerous combination. But he manages to dig in a little bit here and make Ed something more than his usual bundle of ticks.
Bill Murray is spot-on perfect as Bunny Breckenridge. Jeffrey Jones is fantastic as Criswell. I even like Sarah Jessica Parker and Patricia Arquette, both of whose characters are frankly nothing to write home about. And George the Animal Fucking STEELE. How perfect is that?
Of course, we can't forget Martin Landau. A large part of what probably made me predisposed to like this movie more than Burton's others is the fact that I've been fascinated by both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff since I was a kid, and Lugosi's story is so epically tragic and yet so banal in its particulars that I've always found it singularly haunting. I feel like Landau got it, and he provides the beating heart that a) makes this movie work and b) is missing from so many other Burton films.
But, at the end of the day, for me it's all about the script. Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski pull off a nifty hat trick here — a biopic of Ed Wood that simultaneously feels like an Ed Wood movie and yet serves as a scathing critique of the whole Ed Wood ethos, while at the same time celebrating his spirit and making us want to go out and watch a bunch of Ed Wood movies. It's a tough balancing act, and they pull it off with real aplomb. As a writer, it's one of those scripts that makes me think "how'd they do that?"
And, oddly, it is in this one movie where Burton's general lack of interest in anything resembling a recognizable human motivation serves him well as a storyteller. The tendency with any of these biopics is to over-pathologize, to try to understand the subject. So we get a lot of dead brothers, absent mothers, angry fathers, humiliating first sexual experiences, whatever. With Ed, we don't need any of that. He just is who he is, and we go with it. "He likes to dress in women's clothing," the movie seems to be saying, "so fucking what?" Even Lugosi — the more overtly tragic figure here — manages to escape without too much time spent on the analyst's couch.
None of this would have worked but for Alexander's and Karaszewski's deft hand and razor-sharp, almost Coen-like wit. One thing I rarely feel about Tim Burton movies is that they're funny. "Beetlejuice" and "Mars Attacks!" managed to squeeze a few chuckles out of me, but that's pretty much it. The spasmodic nature of his films generally crushes the humor for me the way a speeding truck will crush an injured rabbit. But, for whatever reason, this one has me belly laughing every time I see it.
Like Burton, Alexander and Karaszewski never really hit these heights again. They went on to write "Man in the Moon" and "The People Versus Larry Flynt" — fine enough films but both somehow missing the crazy spark that made this one come to such vivid life. The stars must have just aligned here.
As a writer myself, that's kind of a scary thought. But if I ever manage to write even one script as good as "Ed Wood" in my lifetime, I guess I'll count myself lucky.
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