Movie Review of “Bram
Stoker’s Dracula”
f I used
headlines here, my review of “Bram
Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), directed by Francis Ford
Coppola, would be headlined “Coppola’s
Dracula: One Through the Heart”. The allusion is
to his great 1982 flop, “One From the
Heart,” a strong contender in the middleweight
division of worst movies ever made. The audiences
thought so too, with the film grossing just $636,796.
His “Dracula” did just fine, earning $83
million domestically. But, as we all know, merit and
success are not born and reared as twins.
In
“Dracula,” as in “One From the
Heart,” the art director in Coppola gets the
better of the storyteller. Both movies have gorgeous
sets, sumptuous costumes, exquisite lighting, striking
camera work. As a succession of still pictures, each
one is
a banquet for the eye. As a
motion picture, it’s stillborn. In each case,
Coppola’s chief concern seems to be to make
things beautiful. Along the way, in
“Dracula,” he forgets to make them
suspenseful. This is a story, primarily, of
supernatural horror, but, while deploying supernatural
effects, he neglects to establish a baseline of
naturalism for the effects to play off of. The
intrusion of the supernatural into the normal means
nothing unless you first establish a solid sense of
normalcy.
By losing sight of
story as the armature on which everything else must
hang, Coppola doesn’t dispense with story. There
can be no vacuum here. It just means that the vacuum
gets filled with whatever is in the air. In this case,
it is what we might call the Revised Standard Version
of vampire mythology, the version that has become
common in the West for a generation or so. In it, the
vampire is primarily a romantic (i.e., sexual) figure,
a bit kinky, perhaps, but passionate. A maverick, a
hero, a free spirit. (The purest expression of this
version might be seen in Anne Rice’s
“Interview With the Vampire” (1994), in
which the casting of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as the
main vamps pretty much tells you everything you need to
know about the movie’s tone.)
I hate free
spirits. They all get up and brag, “There is no
one else in the whole world even a teensy bit like
me!” Except for the 4 million other members of
the Maverick, Rebel and Free Spirit Union, whose Local
187 supplies free spirits to Hollywood. There are two
problems with this approach to Dracula’s
character. The first is that it’s not true to
Stoker, which should be a consideration when you call
your movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”
Certainly, there’s a sexual subtext there in the
novel but it’s not the main theme.
The second problem
is that the vampire-as-dangerous-lover is not exactly a
daring approach in 1992. In fact, the staleness
implicit in this choice infects other aspects of the
movie, which frequently teeters on the edge of
unintentional campiness. In the theater where I saw
this, the audience frequently laughed at the serious
events on screen. Here, the sonorous pomp of
Coppola’s style only fattens up the targets.
Coppola gives us a lavish costume drama, not a
supernatural thriller. It may be unkind, but not
untrue, to say that the most dramatic parts of this
movie are the costumes.
The casting
presents another problem, and casting becomes crucial
when you’re telling a love story. Playing
Jonathan Harker and his fiancee Mina are Keanu Reeves
and Winona Ryder, who are charming but lightweight.
They both radiate a sense of the contemporary, an
advantage in many cases, but not here. They are
precisely the wrong choices for a period piece
melodrama. And Gary Oldman (Dracula), while a character
actor of considerable substance, does not perhaps have
the sex appeal to carry the lead of a love story.
In 1992, Ryder was
fresh from Tim Burton’s ironic, surreal ghost
story, “Beetlejuice” (1988). Irony is not
what Coppola is after here, but a bit of comedy now and
then would have relieved the pressure that builds up as
a result of his inflated style. Even the most serious
stories need an occasional laugh (a lesson Shakespeare
understood very well), and if you don’t give it
to your audience in a controlled manner, they’ll
take it in a lawless one, and then you’re well on
your way to losing them.
While approaching
the physical artifacts of the Victorian age with a
lover’s dedication, the movie scorns its manners
and values. This is problematic. It’s like saying
that you love apples but hate apple trees. It suggests
a certain superficiality, a tendency to be hypnotized
by the gleaming surface, the visual shell of life,
without connecting it to its sources. Coppola is
especially (and perhaps intentionally) blind to the
religious element of the Victorians. In Stoker’s
novel, Dracula is a walking blasphemy and the only
proper response is to kill it, with the help of the
Almighty, and, more specifically, with the help of
Christianity. For Coppola to have the dying Dracula
quote two of the last “words” (i.e.,
statements) of Christ on the cross, is appallingly out
of place. “Why have you abandoned me?” he
asks, and then, “It is finished.” Coppola
here is flinging mud at the cross with one hand and
fairy dust into the eyes of the audience with the
other. The lines have nothing to do with the story.
They are a toupee disguising a bald attempt to steal
the gravity from another story for one that lacks its
own.
