BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
A review by The Phantom
(sbb@panix.com)
"Perhaps it was the Dristan," the Phantom thought to himself as he left the theater. Surely the film itself -- a big-budget, prestige film made by one of our most talented and respected filmmakers -- couldn't have been as bad as it seemed. Worse than bad, really, for at times it seemed downright incompetent, and if Coppola is anything at all, he's a most able director who has worked successfully in several different genres, from thriller to war film, crime drama to horror -- a man who in fact is responsible for several of the best films of our time.
So yes, it had to be an unforeseen side-effect of the cold medication the Phantom had taken with his $2 Coke just before the film started. Perhaps its chemistry reacted badly with that of the "golden topping" on the Phantom's $3 popcorn; perhaps the Phantom was still suffering the after-effects of jet lag as his body struggled to cope with the one hour time change between the Loews Astor Plaza in midtown Manhattan and the suburbs of Chicago from which he had just arrived. It had to be something.
Well, it *was* something: it was possibly the least competent horror film and the biggest waste of time, money, and talent the Phantom has witnessed in years. In fact, even putting aside its dubious merits as a horror film, BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA frequently failed even to be nothing more than competent, unremarkable filmmaking. It was, in short, a terrible, horrific botch.
That the film is also one of the most successful of the fall season can only be attributed to the ever more apparent Verhoeven-ization of America. We are now, it seems, a nation of people who will watch nearly anything at all as long as it is big-budget, Hollywood-style entertainment featuring name-brand actors, buckets of blood, and just enough naughty goings on to keep the prurient child in all of us up past his bedtime. Coppola's DRACULA is without a doubt the most successful translation of Paul Verhoeven's formula -- perfected in the blockbuster film BASIC INSTINCT -- to another genre.
Sadly, with the possible exception of musical comedy, it is perhaps the genre for which the BASIC INSTINCT treatment is least appropriate; for while any mediocre thriller can be enlivened by the odd ice-pick killing or kinky sex scene, a good horror film must be subtle above all else. At first this may seem like a contradiction in terms -- after all, if a horror film is to horrify us, mustn't it feature chainsaw murders galore, buckets of blood, walking corpses, or some other equally shocking special effects? The answer is no, at least not if the film has pretensions to be anything other than drive-in fodder. The best horror films do feature scenes of horror -- THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS would have seemed more like MY DINNER WITH ANDRE if Demme had left out Hannibal Lector's jailbreak -- but those scenes are not what drives them. In fact, while the audience may be momentarily shocked by such scenes -- may even find them unforgettable, as many did the infamous shower scene in PSYCHO -- the grueling atmosphere of tension and fear that audiences feel while watching the best horror films is generated by all that builds up to those scenes, not by the scenes themselves, which serve as a form of psychological release from the preceding tension. If a film is nothing but scene after scene of horror, it's really little more than pornography: something that can be enjoyed only on the most voyeuristic of levels. What disturbed audiences about the classic horror film HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER was not so much the scenes in which Henry kills someone -- there are enough of these scenes in the film, true, but not really more than in any average horror film -- but the scenes in which very little at all was going on. In particular, the scene in which Henry describes the circumstances surrounding his mother's death is one of the most gripping -- and horrifying -- in the film, and it touched audiences in just the way the scenes featuring Dr. Lector and Clarice Starling did in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. No buckets of blood; no writhing naked female vampires; no ice-pick killings, but great horror nonetheless -- in fact, because of it.
What we were promised when Coppola set out to bring yet another version of Dracula to the screen was a return to Stoker's original text, long and consistently ignored in screen adaptations of his work. The sixty years since the classic (and now somewhat quaint) version featuring Bela Lugosi's elegant Count have allowed filmmakers to make more explicit what was only implied in Stoker's tale. That this is hardly to anyone's benefit can be seen in Coppola's extended testimonial to the efficacy of Karo syrup and Hollywood's special effects industry: although the film is awash in blood, fancy costumes, miniatures, and matte paintings from the moment the film begins to the moment it ends, it's only after we leave the theater that we have time to wonder what all the fuss was about. For all the vaunted authenticity and loving attention to detail that $42 million can buy, it would seem that Coppola overlooked some frequently neglected but important aspects of his craft: the ability to tell a coherent story and present credible characters and motivations for those characters to the audience, and then allow the audience to use its own imagination to fill in the details.
The best horror films -- in fact, the best films of any kind -- leave more to the audience's imagination than we may at first realize: consider the infamous chainsaw scene in De Palma's SCARFACE, which many people find too graphic to watch, but which few people realize features nothing more than quick cuts between a chainsaw, the victim, and blood on a shower curtain. All the carnage is in their minds, where it affects them so much more deeply than any amount of explicit on-screen gore could. Even though film is primarily a visual medium, explicitness is nearly always dispensable when good writing and acting are available; it's only when they're not that we get to see Michael Douglas' naked rear end. In the case of DRACULA, we get a two-hour definition of the word "rococo" -- a word that until now the Phantom has reserved for use as the ever-dependable answer to 14-across in the New York Times crossword puzzle, but one which will from this moment on be inextricably linked in his mind to images of over-decorated sound stages and young female actresses who are alternately either over- or under-dressed almost faster than the next bottle of Karo can be pressed into service.
Whether Stoker's original novel had the problems Coppola's film adaptation has is beside the point -- after all, a film is not a novel and many sacrifices must be made in order to compress a sprawling narrative into a screenplay for a film with a running length of just under two hours. The studio's publicity machine played up the authenticity angle for all it was worth, and as a result many film critics seem to have been bamboozled into believing that confusing, poorly drawn characters, bad editing, and enough narrative for another GODFATHER trilogy was a necessary price to pay so that we could finally, for the first time in the history of the silver screen, enjoy on film what Stoker originally was able to convey to us only on paper. A triumph, then, of research and period accuracy! Amazing that Coppola could achieve so much without the use of such non-authentic, modern techniques as optical printing and other computer-aided special effects! A visual feast of epic proportions!
Well, so was BASIC INSTINCT, and the Phantom heard precious little from these same critics about the visual feast Verhoeven presented to us in the form of Sharon Stone. While the Phantom has always been a phan of Coppola's work (particularly his early work, including such masterpieces of realism as THE CONVERSATION and THE GODFATHER), he cannot for the life of him understand what happened between the time Coppola read James V. Hart's screenplay and the time the last bucket of blood was tossed in the camera's general direction.
In fact, it would be easier to discuss what *isn't* wrong with DRACULA than to review what is. For all its faults, Coppola's film has a lush, rich look that is very effective in setting the tone of the film, dominated though it is by a heavy reliance on interiors, matte paintings, and miniatures. And in taking a page from Sam Raimi's book, Coppola doesn't overlook any special effect or camera trick that would have been possible before the introduction of computers into mainstream filmmaking (so there is, thankfully, no T2-style morphing in the film). Thus he gives us many strange points of view and unexpected movements of the camera; several sequences in EVIL DEAD-vision (played as a homage to the very few special effects in the 1922 silent classic NOSFERATU); and many subtle and playful tricks for the eye, from shadows that don't, to the Count himself, who doesn't always turn up where our rational senses demand he should.
But it's what he doesn't give us that makes the film so disappointing. Putting aside the screenplay (which is packed full of enough exposition for three DRACULA films), Coppola's tendency to jump us quickly from one scene to the next, then back again, then somewhere else entirely; the dim lighting; the decision to shoot the entire film inside a sound stage, giving the production a very claustrophobic feel; and the miscasting of the film's principals all lead inexorably to the very confusing and muddled result. The film as structured is completely dependent on the eventual emotional connection between Ryder and Oldman, but for whatever reason this never happens -- and in any event, their eventual meeting comes much too late in the proceedings to make much difference at that point. If the point of this version of the Dracula legend is to play up the "Love Never Dies" aspect of the story -- certainly a promising new take on a shopworn old tale -- why is the climactic meeting so delayed? Coppola's answer seems to be that he needed time to give us three or four other climaxes first, and while each vignette plays out satisfactorily, we are hurled from one to the next so quickly and abruptly that we lose any sense of continuity; by the time the film has reached its final "climax" we can barely keep up with the plot, let alone any of the characters who are tossed in for the film's denouement. Did we really need Van Helsing *and* Renfield *and* not one; not two; but three of Lucy's suitors? Is Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) important at all? If not, why does he dominate the first half of the film? If so, why is he literally abandoned halfway through? Coppola doesn't seem to know; worse, he doesn't seem to care. And by the end of the film, neither do we.
It may be that Coppola started down this road with good intentions; after all, it's hard to believe that such a mess could have been made intentionally. Ironically, by sparing no expense in attempting to create an up-to-date version of the Dracula tale by returning to the original narrative, Coppola accomplished much less than Roger Corman might have 30 years ago for over $40 million less. His adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories -- including the excellent THE HOUSE OF USHER, THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, and THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH -- are as full of costumes and over-the-top acting as Coppola's big- budget kitschfest; but where Coppola lost himself in the techniques of horror filmmaking like a kid in a -- very expensive -- candy store, Corman always knew what was most important and what safely could be offered up as a sacrifice to the gods of low-budget filmmaking. Expensive special effects were never an option for Corman, but sound screenplays and good performances were, and he never willingly stinted on those. As a result, Corman's Poe adaptations are as beautiful, as watchable, and as effective today as they were almost three decades ago. And whereas these films remain among the very best of his work, Coppola's kitchen-sink adaptation of Stoker's tale will likely be forgotten six months after its inevitable video release.
In fact, it's already seeming a little hazy to the Phantom, though then again, that could have more to do with the Dristan than the film itself. Perhaps the Phantom's best advice to his phans would be to avoid operating heavy machinery after watching DRACULA, and to discontinue use and sneak into ALADDIN in the theater next door if disorientation sets in. DRACULA is this season's most expensive prescription for disappointment, and the Phantom can only hope that its success does not lead to a wave of similarly sloppy and ineffective "horror" films in the months and years to come.
: The Phantom : sbb@panix.com : cmcl2!panix!sbb
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