Cinema
Ed Wood (`15', selected cinemas) Don Juan de Marco (`15', selected cinemas)
Wobbly times
Mark Steyn
Johnny Depp is a movie star and it's hard to figure out why. He has full lips, a touch of puppy fat and designer stubble, but none of his films has been a box-office smash and in those that did okay, he's never borne the weight of the picture. A clue to his success can be found in the Hollywood nightclub he owns, the notorious Viper Rooms. River Phoenix collapsed and died there, and Jason Donovan (in the low-bud- get British version with the less conclusive- ly resolved narrative) collapsed and then got up again. This mirrors the pattern for Depp's screen career: his is the name on the property, but it's the other guys who do all the work. Indeed, he seems to exist only in relationship to others, his very name sug- gesting someone filling in until a real star shows up. This month, he takes the title roles in both Ed Wood and Don Juan de Marco, but the meat in the former is Martin Landau and in the latter Marlon Brando.
Ed Wood is Tim Burton's big-budget biopic of the no-budget director who, in the Fifties, gave us Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Wood has already been the subject of a diverting doc- umentary, Look Back in Angora (he had a fetish for this particular knitwear, at least as it clung to big-breasted babes), but Bur- ton, while also clinging heavily to the ango- ra, sees Wood as an idiot savant at the movies, sort of Forrest Gump Goes to Holly- wood. It was probably a subliminal For- rest/Wood thing: he'd have done the same with Beerbohm Tree. Anyway, it's beauti- fully shot in monochrome, the gals look good in or out of their sweaters and Lan- dau turns in a swell performance as Bela Lugosi. But Wood is no Forrest; it's all branches and no tree. There's a huge hole where the central character should be and Depp's gosh-oh-my saucer eyes and boyish charm just can't carry it.
In Jeremy Leven's Don Juan, Depp gives exactly the same featherweight perfor- mance he does in Ed Wood, only this time with a Castilian accent. He thinks he's Don Juan, the Latin lover in cape and mask who, with violin obbligato, `geevs weemen thee greatest pleasure they weel ever expe- rience'. In fact, he is in modem-day New York so they toss him in the psychiatric hospital. Both Ed and Don invite us to con- sider whether fantasy is sustainable in the face of the evidence — in the case of Plan 9 From Outer Space, because of Ed's 79 per cent budget; and, in the case of Don's romantic idealism, because, as his shrink says, 'we've surrendered our lives to the momentum of mediocrity'. Ed puts a lightweight star with a lightweight subject and sinks the movie; Don puts a lightweight star with a potentially heavy premise and the whole rises gloriously, frothily into the heavens aided by Marlon Brando as a mas- sive barrage balloon.
Depp is a gay blade of the Tyrone Power school, his language as ornate as his threads: he tells the exotic Sultana of 'thee wooman who brought my manhood alive and made it sing', and she says, 'it sings?' But did any of his adventures actually hap- pen? Or were they triggered by his well- thumbed copy of El Burlador de Sevilla, back on his bedside table at his grandma's apartment in Queens? Enter Brando as the psychiatrist. Depp thinks he's El Burlador but Brando is too burly to get through any door. His first line in the picture is addressed to a cop: 'Hey, you're puttin' on a little weight . . . '
That's pretty rich coming from a 4001b lardbutt wobbling around like Mister Blob- by up there. But that's part of the joke. As Depp relates his story, we flashback from the drab precincts of his hospital to lush paradises with a (literally) ravishing score of tangos and habaneras. And, instead of `curing' his patient and returning him to reality, the doc rediscovers the allure of fantasy. Brando has a ball here because he's chosen to invest a fable with his own myth. Depp's character may be a nobody from Queens but, he says, if you believe I'm Don Juan, then I am. In the end, how- ever, he's neither Don Juan nor a nobody from Queens; he's just Johnny Depp. Bran- do, though, is both fantasy and reality, the ultimate movie star and simultaneously the all-time colossal butterball, fatter than the fattest bluecollar blubber-ass pumpin' gas at the truck-stop, the fattest guy you've ever seen on screen. As if to emphasise the contrast between him and dishy Depp, Brando has terrible clothes and a boring car. When he bunks off early for an after- noon romp with Faye Dunaway, we get the first Hollywood sex scene where the man has the sheet neatly tucked round his neck and it's left to the woman to get her leg over: after all, you can't find a body double for a fellow whose body is quadruple. But it's sweetly touching, and it's Brando con- fronting his legend — as he does explicitly when he looks across at a photograph of his younger self. Just as a kid from Queens can be Don Juan, so a ton of cellulite can still be Marlon Brando. Ed Wood tries to turn Fifties schlock into a Nineties icon, and fails. Don Juan turns a Fifties icon into Nineties schlock rather endearingly.
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