Dead Man (guest review by Bryce Wilson)

Thanks my good friend Bryce from Things That Don’t Suck for the following article.

‘Dead Man’ is an astoundingly pretentious movie. But don’t hold it against it.

Every now and again you come across a film that has seems not just odd but to have genuinely evolved along a separate evolutionary track. And that’s ‘Dead Man’ all the way, just your average Saturday Matinee on Alpha Centuri, where everyone watches B Movie Proto Mumblecore westerns that mix arch black and white style with, meandering quasi formed ideas about Native American Spirtuality and William Blake.

Even comparing it to Jaramusch’s other work offers little help. While his other movies inseredt sly signposts letting you know what level Jaramusch was putting you on, ‘Dead Man’ offers no such cheat sheet. Even comparing it to ‘Ghost Dog’, which has a similar schism between its offering of austere meditations on Bushido and its weird riffs on Seijun Suzuki and Tarantino, offers little help. It’s as if Jaramusch has gotten deeply invested in his mumbo jumbo, but is kind of embarrassed about it. It’s like having a conversation with someone who puts mocking air quotes around everything he says, and then concludes by going “Seriously though it was pretty deep.”

‘Dead Man’ follows Johnny Depp as a milquetoast accountant from Cleveland, who ends up on the run after killing the son of Robert Mitchum. Hunted by a gang of killers, and guided by the Native American Nobody who takes him for the (short lived) reincarnation of William Blake. However this makes the movie sound like it has a lot more form then it actually does. Most of the film consists of Depp simply wandering into weird shit.

‘Dead Man’ is at its best when it’s at its least self conscience, which isn’t often. There are the scenes with Robert Mitchum in full force of nature/wrath of God mode. Perpetually framed by a cheeky Jarmusch in front of stuffed Bears, Displays of guns, Giant Portraits of himself and other things that reflect what a bad motherfucker Robert Mitchum is. As well as the scenes following the trio of bounty hunters Mitchum hires to assassinate Blake, including a shockingly funny Michael Wincot, and Lance Henrikson as a man with more dark secretes then seem possible. Their sections resemble nothing so much as the laconic naturalistic bickering between the principles in the early Jarmusch masterpieces, like ‘Stranger Than Paradise’ and ‘Down By Law’. If one makes allowances for the fact that they occasionally kill people and eat one another. The particular punch line to their scenes is exceedingly dark.

This is one of those frustrating reviews. I know it doesn’t sound like it but I have some very real affection for this weird little mutant of a movie. Much like the Neil Young score that haunts it, the quality of ‘Dead Man’ all depends on your point of view. It’s either a sparse and haunting meditation, or as Ebert suggested the sound of a man dropping his guitar for two hours.

Then again who is to say that it can’t be both?

PERSONAL FAVES: Ed Wood

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 96 of 100

Halfway through ‘Ed Wood’ – a film I saw at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema when it was first released in 1994 and have reapproached every three or four years since – I grabbed a pen, jotted a few words down and congratulated myself on a nifty opening line for this review:

“ ‘Ed Wood’ is what happens when a capable director makes a film about the life of an incapable director.”

Might need tightening, but hey-ho, good opener. I settled down to finish the movie, which has become like an old friend to me over the years, then fired up the laptop to start this review. I took another look at the sentence I’d jotted down and it struck me as inappropriate; a glib generalisation.

Tim Burton a “capable” filmmaker? Talk about damning with faint praise! Excuse me while I put my sniffy, academic, middle-aged Sight and Sound critic’s hat on!

Tim Burton, for want a better all-encompassing, single-word description, is an inspired director.

Nor is it completely accurate to deem Edward D. Wood Jnr “incapable”. Ed Wood was a man who made movies for virtually no budget, their runtimes padded with stock footage, his scripts tortuously contrived to incorporate said elements or explain away the non-existent production values; a man who peopled his opuses with actors who couldn’t act simply because they’d appear for free or they were his friends. A man who didn’t – unlike certain directors (no names mentioned, but dude your car insurance adverts are freakin’ annoying) – start out with the backing of a studio, some semblance of a budget, a script that could actually have worked and cast members who had proved themselves admirably elsewhere and still emerge with a stinker of epic proportions. Wood, too, can best be described as inspired – just in a different way.

Ed Wood (played with wide-eyed gleeful empathy by Johnny Depp) genuinely loves cinema; it’s something he aspires to even as his off-Broadway play (a belaboured wartime morality tale) dies a quiet death in a dingy theatre, its cast significantly more populated than the audience. The play’s a three-hander, by the way.

Encouraged by his long-time (and long-suffering) girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), Wood battles to get his hastily penned genre scripts into production. As his bounces from commercial failure to critical failure (usually within the scope of the same movie), collects an entourage of fellow oddballs including supposed psychic Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), voluptuous late-night TV host Vampira (Lisa Marie), camp transsexual Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray in excelsis) and faded horror movie star Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau).

It’s the friendship between Wood and Lugosi that forms the emotional core of ‘Ed Wood’, Martin Landau bringing a heartfelt gravitas to his Oscar-winning performance as the elderly Lugosi. Landau provides the anchor upon which Depp’s typically expressive performance is held.

Late in the film – with Lugosi’s health failing and Dolores leaving Wood for the heinous sins of giving a lead role to another actress and having a penchant for wearing her undies and angora sweaters – Wood strikes up a tentative romance with the starry-eyed Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette), a relationship which counterpoints Lugosi’s eventual and inevitable death. It’s from the last bit of footage he shot of Lugosi that Wood crafts his “masterpiece”, ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. Funded by a religious organisation deluded enough to think they’re putting their funds into an educational and gently improving blockbuster that will spread the word and swell their ranks, the title is hastily changed from the original ‘Grave Robbers From Outer Space’ when his backers express outrage at the concept of grave robbing.

Still, after much wrangling and a few inspirational words from his hero Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio), Wood gets to make his movie – suffering his entire cast to be baptized in order to secure the funding – and declares it, as he and Kathy head to Las Vegas to get married, “the one I’ll be remembered for”.

He wasn’t wrong.