DIRECTOR
Francis Ford Coppola
SCREENWRITER
James
V. Hart
based
on the novel by
Bram
Stoker
PRODUCERS
Francis Ford Coppola
Fred Fuchs
Charles Mulvehill
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Michael Ballhaus
MUSIC
Wojciech Kilar
EDITORS
Anne Goursaud
Glen Scantlebury
Nicholas C. Smith
CAST
Gary Oldman (Prince Vlad Dracula)
Winona Ryder (Mina Murray)
Anthony Hopkins (Van Helsing)
Keanu Reeves (Jonathan Harker)
Richard E. Grant (Dr. Jack Seward)
Cary Elwes (Lord Arthur Holmwood)
Bill Campbell (Quincey P. Morris)
Sadie Frost (Lucy Westenra)
Tom Waits (Renfield)
Monica Bellucci (Dracula's Bride)
Michaela Bercu (Dracula's Bride)
Florina Kendrick (Dracula's Bride)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 130m
U.S. release: November 13, 1992
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Francis
Ford Coppola films
reviewed on this website:
- The
Rainmaker
See also:
- Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein
|
According
to legend, Bram Stoker got his initial inspiration for Dracula
after waking from a nightmare induced by eating some bad shellfish.
Francis Ford Coppola might have had the same dish before cooking
up Bram Stoker's Dracula, a gray blur of a movie with
the puzzling logic of dreams. Coppola's approach takes some getting
used to: Parts of the movie could be titled My Own Private
Transylvania, with surreal images bumping together; some
moments (a woman raped by a snarling wolfman incarnation of Dracula)
are borderline stupid. Yet it hangs together, this feverish mish-mash,
and if it occasionally stumbles while trying for grandeur, at
least it tries.
Unlike the book, the film opens under the red skies of 15th-century
Transylvania, where the noble Prince Vlad Dracul the Impaler
(Gary Oldman) shoves spears into Turks on the battlefield, leaving
their impaled bodies wriggling by the road in the name of Christ.
(Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart take a decidedly generous
view of Vlad, on whom Stoker is widely -- some say erroneously
-- believed to have based Dracula, and who is considered one
of the most vicious rulers in history.) Returning home, Vlad
finds his wife dead, a suicide: She'd received false word that
he died in battle. What's more, because she took her own life,
her soul is damned. "I renounce God!" shrieks Vlad
as gouts of blood pour forth from a giant cross. Eager to join
his beloved in hell, Vlad catches some blood in a chalice, gulps
it down, and begins his reign as Dracula, Prince of Darkness.
After this entertainingly melodramatic prologue (with its echoes
of Excalibur, Kurosawa, and so on), Coppola gets around
to the events of the book. Four centuries later, the aged Dracula
shuffles through his ornate and crumbling castle, his face pale
and creased with wrinkles, his long, spidery fingers reaching,
reaching. Wearing a wig that makes his head resemble a
large valentine, Gary Oldman has a grand time camping it up through
layers of prosthetics. He puts on a creaky, preposterously theatrical
Romanian accent; if bats could talk, they'd sound like Oldman's
Dracula. When the young real-estate agent Jonathan Harker (Keanu
Reeves) arrives at Castle Dracula to finalize a deal with the
Count, the old vampire offers him a cheery yet ominous greeting:
"Enter freely and of your own veel. And leef some of da
hoppiness you breeng."
The young, callow Harker isn't up to dealing with Dracula, and
neither is the young, callow Reeves, who gives an embarrassing
performance. Reeves carries too much contemporary baggage to
be credible in a 19th-century milieu, and his English accent
is about as persuasive as Kevin Costner's in Robin Hood.
Luckily, we don't see much of him, though he keeps a straight
face in the film's loopiest scene. When Dracula's trio of voluptuous
brides descend on Harker, they bare their fangs and begin sucking
every inch of his upper body. As if anticipating our own wayward
thoughts about where this is going, Coppola has one of the brides
move her mouth somewhere south of Harker's belt buckle. (He responds
like a proper, horrified, and suddenly quite interested Victorian
gentleman.) It's one of many moments that teeter between the
queasy, the erotic, and the hilarious.
Taking the prologue a step further, Coppola turns Harker's fiancée
Mina (Winona Ryder) into a reincarnation of Dracula's lost love.
Hence Dracula's obsession with Mina, and hers with him. Following
Mina to London, Dracula, now youthful and handsome, seduces her
in a peep-show joint (a bizarre scene -- the flowering of evil
at the birth of cinema). Oldman and Ryder manage some heat in
their S & M couplings; for a few scenes, the movie becomes
about a kinky couple that's into biting. But this smooth, dashing
Dracula is a bit dull compared with the elderly, cackling Count;
Oldman, in the movie's first section, has stolen his own thunder.
Whenever Coppola cuts to the bug-eating Renfield (Tom Waits,
growling impressively) or to the dedicated, slightly demented
vamp-slayer Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins, chewing the scenery
and spitting it out), the audience is so starved for over-the-top
acting that it perks up immediately.
Coppola, however, never stops putting on his own showboat performance.
His Dracula isn't like anything else around. He presents
the material with a certain heaviosity, as if this weren't just
a vampire movie but the vampire movie. Going for the gold
medal in sepulchral gloom, he lays on the darkness, the pea-soup
fog. The characters step into suffocating shadows, never to emerge
again. The atmosphere of evil spreads like a stain across the
frozen countryside. The white, white faces of the vampire women
-- including Mina's doomed friend Lucy (the touching Sadie Frost)
-- hover in the dark, grinning. When Dracula first sees a picture
of Mina, his shadow demonstrates what he'd like to do to his
rival Harker, while he himself stands still.
All of which makes for a movie of considerable visual fascination,
and I'd like to see Bram Stoker's Dracula one or two more
times, despite minor misgivings; it strikes me as the sort of
intoxicating spectacle that improves upon repeated viewings,
like Brazil or Blade Runner. Flaws and all, Coppola
has pulled off a genuine achievement here: He's redefined the
way we think of Dracula visually. And I've figured out
why the movie looks so dark and jumbled: This is the way a vampire,
in his blood fever, might see the world. If you want the Dracula
story straight, with no frills or sketchily drawn characters,
read Bram Stoker's Dracula. If you want dazzling images
and the thrill of watching a major director push the envelope
of fantasy film, see Bram Stoker's Dracula. |
