Ed Wood, or The Unexpected Virtue of Blind Passion

Film: Ed Wood

Director: Tim Burton

Release Date: September 1994

I want to depart from my traditional method of reviewing these films that I recommend. Make no mistake, Ed Wood is a great film with plenty to be said about its cinematography and direction, and there are some truly terrific performances as well. But I think there is something more that can be covered here, a bit of a bigger picture that this film helps reveal.

When some aspect of life starts to become your central focus, you start to see it everywhere and in everything. And over the last six months, as I have worked on my novel and short stories and generally tried to figure out my future in the art form, that all-consuming focus has been the idea of chasing one’s dream. A great deal of film has been devoted to the idea up to this point, but most of the stories are about people who chase a dream, struggle for a little bit, and then become overwhelming successes. Inspiring perhaps the first few times, but ultimately somewhat sterile. I am a big believer in art as a way to affect people’s lives, and I’ve never frankly been convinced that sort of film (or book, or song, or painting) is useful in that regard. Everyone already knows how great it will be to catch the dream, and what they really need is art that is about the struggle and about the failure.

In this regard, two recent movies, Frank and Whiplash have been excellent portrayals of the two main aspects of said struggle: the struggle to prove and develop an innate talent and the challenge of using that talent to find something beautiful that actually needs to be said. Both films raise some pretty uncomfortable questions for anyone who is out pursuing an art form: What if I’m just fundamentally not good enough? What if I do everything right but get unlucky? What if I possess the talent but lack the ability to find real art to apply it to? There aren’t easy answers to any of those, and the films don’t really pretend that there are.

Ed Wood doesn’t ask any of these questions. For all I know, Tim Burton may have just found Ed Wood fascinating. But I think there is something for dreamers in there as well. Ed Wood is not a man who wonders if he possesses the talent or vision. He’s a man who chases his passions without any concerns for these things. And it shows, of course. Every scene is viewed as perfect immediately, no lines are rewritten, no mistakes fixed. Never at any point does he consider that any of the small details matter. He exalts the vision above all. “He’s awful at this!” the consensus declares. And they are right. Ed Wood is a truly terrible director. But he is a wonderful dreamer. I can’t be cynical about Ed Wood.

I consider myself to be a bit of a connoisseur of bad films (and perhaps I’d be better suited to writing about bad films than good ones). I have watched many, many terrible movies, ranging from dull and uninteresting to incompetent at an astonishing level. And what runs as a common thread through almost all of the worst films is some lack of care or passion behind the camera. Monster A-Go-Go (which is a good deal worse than Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space) was half-shot, left in a storage room, and then finished ten years later by producers who needed something to pad better features. Gigli was a butcher’s job on a supposedly reasonable script in an attempt to cash in on the celebrity relationship of its stars. There is this cynicism of the film’s creators about the world and about film that causes us to react with our own cynicism and disdain. When Adam Sandler creates Jack and Jill as a way to funnel money to his untalented, washed-up friends, we return his callousness. And that’s fine. Those people deserve our scorn, because they hurt the entire art form with their exploitation.

But I cannot be cynical about Ed Wood. The man never approached filmmaking with the kind of jaded indifference of the others. He probably cared too much about his films, held onto the vision too hard. I think that’s why, despite the fact that Plan 9 is probably not even a top 10 worst film, it still enchants people to this day. Because it is charming in its misdirected passion. His love for his art form shines through all of the cracked ugliness of the films themselves. He didn’t fail because he didn’t believe in what he was doing, he failed because he just wasn’t that good at it. And even as we laugh at his colossal mistakes, I think we know that he was only trying his best. He just wanted to be great. He wasn’t in it for the money (and in fact, none of his films ever turned a profit).

As an artist of any kind, especially at the outset of that journey, it is easy to become consumed with the fear of it all. What if I think I’m making great work and it turns out I’m Ed Wood? But you could do a lot worse. Ed Wood was a spectacular disaster even within his own lifetime, and yet he never stopped making new films. And I think that the artist who tries to fly and plummets to the Earth is a far greater success than the one who hides in the ground. We may learn nothing from his filmmaking, but there’s plenty to be learned from his resolve.

So I would recommend Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, although I have mentioned almost nothing of the film itself. Hopefully, if you’re a dreamer, it’ll help you to focus a little less on catching your dream, and a little more on the joy of chasing it.

Mr. Nobody

Film: Mr. Nobody

Director: Jaco Van Dormael

Release Date: September 2009

How wild and fractured are the possible outcomes of our choices, and how much harder is it to ever actually make those impossible decisions? This is the central question of Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody and, admittedly, it is a concept that has seen its fair share of film adaptation. But while others have traditionally taken the so-called butterfly effect and used it to raise questions about whether or not we should meddle with the past, or as a lesson in how our small, careless decisions can impact our lives and the lives of those around us, Van Dormael uses this film to instead suggest that each possible future is both beautiful and ugly, and most importantly, entirely valid. Knowing the possible outcomes of a choice does not make the choice any easier, because there is rarely a clear demarcation of right and wrong choices when viewed by the total impact of life.

The film struck me very early on as having strong visual and pacing similarities to both the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, excellent films that I will interject to recommend right now. The former debuted after Mr. Nobody so this similarity is likely coincidental, and the latter shares its visual effects supervisor Louis Morin, which explains quite a bit. All three of these films are made up of scattered images that are loosely attached within the runtime, but which come together to paint very clear and vivid pictures when taken on the whole. What I consider to be this film’s great accomplishment (and one it shares with Cloud Atlas) is that throughout a long playing time, it feels as though it is always moments away from its emotional climax. I am very much a believer in film as experience, and it is no small accomplishment when a film can make the audience feel something intense and overwhelming not just once, but dozens of different times without ever feeling forced.

At the center of this is a frankly phenomenal performance by Jared Leto as Nemo Nobody, or at least the 34 year old and 118 year old versions. And that’s something I do want to take a moment to point out. I prefer to go into films relatively dark, especially with regards to actors, and I did not believe until afterward that this wizened, wheezing old man was Jared Leto. Hats off to the makeup team who did a magnificent job, and what a performance by Leto to embody this character so well, down to the minute movements of the mouth and face to mimic common expressions of elderly men. Too often, we view a great actor by the immensity of their acting, by how over-the-top and ridiculous their character is. But Leto’s performance here captures all of the subtle emotional intensity of such a range of circumstances in his life, and the nuance and skill to portray all of them so expertly cannot be overstated. He is surrounded on all sides by a talented cast who were all excellent, but a specific nod needs to be made to Toby Regbo and Juno Temple, who play fifteen year old versions of Nemo and Anna respectively. They capture this sort of frantic, reckless passion and seemingly endless weight of the incoming future that so well characterize the middle teenage years, and both of them should have bright futures.

Mr. Nobody may not be a film for everyone, given that there are many times during its two hour runtime where nothing is really happening in the literal sense. But there is always a strong emotional connection and a feeling of something larger than a story floating around, and a great performance by the cast and the excellent visual decisions by the team keep it perpetually interesting and connected. While we may be no closer to knowing which choices we should make in our lives, I can say for certain that seeing this film is one of the better ones you could make.

Bronson

Film: Bronson

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Release Date: October 2008

 

Before director Nicolas Winding Refn made the critically-acclaimed neo-noir film Drive (and the less well-received Only God Forgives), he was making a name for himself in Europe with a penchant for hyper-real crime dramas that focused on the grittiness of the underbelly of society. It should make sense then that it was Refn who would direct Bronson, the tale of a man frequently proclaimed “Britain’s most violent prisoner”. Because at the heart of this film is Charlie Bronson, an ugly, angry man who loves fighting and calls his prison cell a “hotel room”, a sort of uncomfortable figure to acknowledge can possibly exist.

The film itself, made on a shoestring budget of only $230,000, is told from the perspective of Charlie Bronson as the star of a one-man show of his life, an allusion to his obsession with fame and the idea that he is special. While the film has many clever stylistic elements, including a conversation between Bronson and his own portrayal of another character, it retains a rawness when it comes to the fighting sequences. And there are a lot of them. Charlie rubs himself down with varying substances numerous times throughout the movie and gets in extended fights with guards, inmates, and others. But they never stray into the realm of cheesy choreography, because each one is an ugly brawl, and one senses at all points the brutality of the fight and Bronson’s masochistic (or perhaps sadistic) enjoyment of it.

But the real reason this film succeeds is Tom Hardy’s portrayal of the titular character. Hardy has gained a great deal of well-deserved acclaim for his roles in Christopher Nolan’s Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, but enough cannot be said of his range and ability to really embody characters. He is part Victorian strongman, part brooding, troubled soul, part crowd-pleasing showman, and part deranged psychopath. And Hardy really captures the interplay between these elements in a way that is always deeply interesting and entirely entertaining. Hardy’s mustachioed lunatic has the sort of charisma that one is always thrilled to discover, and though he is on screen for north of 90% of the film’s runtime, it is hard to not wish that he was present for more of it. There are some films that are driven by the vision and design of their director, and others that are driven by the force of their star, and though Refn is by no means a slouch, Bronson is a delightful film because of the marvelous job that Hardy does in displaying all of the elements of a conflicted, contradictory, and occasionally charming brawler. If nothing else, you should watch this film to see the sort of things that Tom Hardy is capable of as an actor.

5 Centimeters per Second

Film: 5 Centimeters per Second

Director: Makoto Shinkai

Release Date: March 2007

5 Centimeters per Second is the third feature film from director Makoto Shinkai, and a departure from the science fiction and fantasy based films he made prior to it. Shinkai has earned himself the nickname “The New Miyazaki” in anime film circles, and it isn’t hard to see why. There is a similarity in their artistic styles and they frequently share otherworldly settings, combined with characters who are both bizarre and relatable.

But 5 Centimeters per Second is none of those things. Far from being a band of colorful creatures on a far-reaching mystical quest, it is a movie grounded in the utterly mundane, the exceedingly realistic and ordinary. And that is precisely why this film excels in a way that few others do, because it unmasks the beauty of the every day world and the people who populate it in a fashion that it could not do were it stretched out over some bigger story.

The film is broken up into three parts, titled Cherry Blossom, Cosmonaut, and 5 Centimeters per Second, and tells the tale of Takaki Tono as he progresses from the beginning of junior high through to adulthood. But rather than being slogged down in the details and recanting each action and event that takes place as it grows older, the film instead offers us three short snapshots of three different faces of Takaki’s life. And that is all that we need, because the stories are so well-told, the snapshots so painstakingly framed, that we know everything we need to know about the characters and how they feel without ever needing to be told.

Assisting this is the nearly immaculate beauty of the animation in the film. Shinkai’s ability to create backdrops that are both dreamy and grounded, mirroring the feelings of characters in situations that will stay with them both as real memories and as fleeting dreams, is exceptional, and may even surpass the legendary Miyazaki. The details of the characters and their settings are so strong that this film would rarely struggle to tell its story even if it possessed no dialogue at all.

But where the film succeeds most grandly is that it tells a story of love and loss that is both piercing and reassuring in the same stroke. At its hardest moments, it is devastatingly sad, filled with the sort of ache that anyone who has been in the situation will immediately understand. But in its brightest spots, it offers a few rays of hope and a vision of love not lost, but endured, survived, and cherished. If there is a villain to be found, it is time itself and its march forward, where each beautiful memory becomes farther away and each person must adapt to a new and sometimes colder world. But Shinkai shows us a glimpse of a brighter future, of new chances and new beginnings, to make new memories to hold onto, and it is a testament to his vision that he accomplishes all of this without ever needing to preach it.

At just over an hour, 5 Centimeters per Second is a quick watch, and one that you’ll wish lasted longer, even if it twists your heart. I wholeheartedly recommend it.