BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA is film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, written by James V. Hart from the novel by Bram Stoker. The film stars Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Bill Campbell, Tom Waits, and Sadie Frost. Rated R, due to violence, nudity, language.
BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA is Francis Ford Coppola's earnest effort to create the definitive Dracula movie. He and his writer James V. Hart (HOOK) have dragged in the epistolary style of the original novel by having voice-over readings of various characters' journals and letters. And despite obvious efforts to get away from the 1927 stage version, the vehicle, by the way, that originally launched Bela Lugosi in his strange career as Dracula, Hart has introduced his own novelties, such as updating vampirism to a blood disease that has to bring the AIDS infection to any modern viewer's mind as well as novelties in his prologue and in the reincarnation theme. Coppola and those who labor for him cannot touch any source material without leaving Francis Ford's fingerprints all over it. And any pretense that this is the "real" Stoker novel is as misleading as claiming that APOCALYPSE NOW was the "real" HEART OF DARKNESS.
Now whether the Coppola interpretation of the Dracula story sounds like a good idea is up to you. For this viewer, the combination is a natural. Coppola's great visual lushness and romanticism seem ideally suited to a story that is the sine qua non of decadent eroticism. And to his credit, the romantic angle is decidedly the one being emphasized here. Not the horror, not the gore, not even the suspense -- after Dracula leaves his castle and Keanu Reeves behind -- but the literally immortal love story of Vlad the Impaler and his princess. As a result, this Dracula is the first really sympathetic one I've ever encountered in a long life of devouring Dracula movies. Dracula's death is a supreme act of love reaching across the centuries.
Overall, I'd have to say that Coppola's DRACULA is a mixed blessing. Much of it is fresh, clever, even witty. It bogs down somewhat under its own 123-minute running time. Some of the performances are problematical. The visual element drives the story element. A lot of the story makes no literal sense. But in the end, Coppola has succeeded in capturing the very essence of the 1897 novel, vampirism as a metaphor for society's fears of sex, especially female sexuality (a theme interestingly resonant in these days of anti-gay legal maneuvers and religious groups).
Coppola's DRACULA is a complete document of this metaphor. The costumes of Eiko Ishioka (Dracula's gold robe reminded me of that all-too familiar Gustav Klimt painting of The Lovers), the music of Wojciech Kilar, the production designs of Thomas Sanders, and the complexly edited film constantly using two or three superimposed images all conspired to give the film its unique look. And the makeup and wigs, especially the wonderful transformations of Dracula himself, are masterful and fascinating. Everything is lush, overwhelming, sumptuous, voluptuous, and charged with strange eroticisms.
Of the actors the film belongs first to Gary Oldman, who played Oswald in JFK and Joe Orton in PRICK UP YOUR EARS. He is the perfect casting choice, a highly eccentric actor in a stylized, artificial part driven by the controlling metaphor of the film, turning caricature into character and a tragic character at that. As just one example of Oldman's achievement let me refer those of you who've seen it to the scene where Dracula helps Harker (Reeves) shave. It chills me to just think about it.
Winona Ryder as Mina seems to me very much an old-fashioned movie star. She has the look and style, a somewhat anti-naturalistic style, that perfectly suits the restrained passions of the Victorian millieu. And her accent seems a lot less strained to these American ears than that of Reeves in the part of Mina's fiance, Jonathan Harker. Reeves's presence strikes me as the biggest blunder in the film; he never connects with his part of the restrained, repressed and ambitious clerk of the London real estate firm. He has a high charged encounter in Dracula's castle, an encounter that is the most overtly sexual (in the usual sense) in the film, and yet I never felt it really touched him.
Of the second string, Anthony Hopkins is having the most fun as the vampire-hunter Van Helsing. This DRACULA never develops much of the theme of a personal struggle between Van Helsing and Dracula, and as a result Van Helsing is more comic relief than avenging angel. A lot of people are going to enjoy Hopkins's over-the-top and anti-Lectorish performance. I found it slightly tasteless and slightly offensive, which is the opposite of my reaction to the parallel performance Alan Rickman put in as the comic-relief Sheriff of Nottingham in ROBIN HOOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES, no one should expect consistency from me.
Otherwise, Sadie Frost is fine as Mina's friend Lucy, who precedes her into vampiric union with Dracula. Cary Elwes is a pretty face as Lucy's fiance, Richard E. Grant ineffective as one of the failed suitors and morphine-shooting proprietor of a hellish insane asylum, and Bill Campbell unintendedly comic as the oafish American suitor. On the other hand, Tom Waits is a fair treat as the insectivorous Renfield. He has a moment when he kisses Mina's fingers through the bars of his cell that is pretty shivery in its own right, as well as in its echo of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.
The first thirty minutes or so is the best: the prologue set in the 15th Century and the castle scenes before Dracula decamps for London. Nothing that follows quite comes up those first thirty minutes for originality and overall interest. But the rest of the film is good enough and in places for briefer periods approaches the level of the opening parts. This DRACULA achieves a quality of dreamlike lushness and romanticism that makes it unique in the history of this subgenre. It is erotic without a lot of overt nudity and naughty bits, it is horrifying without a lot of the explicit gore of the usual horror film (not that there isn't blood a plenty, but mostly just out of the frame). Coppola has accomplished what he apparently set out to do, viz., to redefine the vampire movie on the level of grand opera, just as he did with APOCALYPSE NOW for the war movie and with GODFATHER for the gangster movie.
Consequently, I can recommend BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA to you, even at full prices.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews