Movie Review of “Shadow of
the Vampire” and “Auto Focus”
f you want
to see a great vampire movie, see “Shadow
of the Vampire” (2000)
with Willem Dafoe as Max Shreck, an actor who does an
amazing job playing a vampire because he is a vampire.
This is a movie about a movie, the filming of
“Nosferatu,” the 1922 vampire classic of
German director F. W. Murnau, played here by John
Malkovitch as a ruthless artist who will do anything
for his art, including sacrificing the lives of his
cast and crew to keep Shreck happy and well-fed.
Dafoe’s performance is simply uncanny. You forget
that he is Dafoe. You forget that he is
an actor. You forget that he is a
human being. No comfy smoldering Byronic poses for
Dafoe. He restores to the figure of the vampire the
horror that had been drained for decades from it by
mushy romance writers who wanted the vampire to be
sexy, someone you could have a relationship with. This
is a definitive performance. I would hate to be an
actor called on to play a (serious) vampire after this.
Dafoe has nailed this role and it won’t be going
anywhere for a long time. This movie (directed by E.
Elias Merhige from a screenplay by Steven Katz) is as
classic in its own right as “Nosferatu”
– and certainly blows away such lightweight fare
as the Bela Lugosi “Dracula” of 1931, not
to mention Coppola’s “Dracula.”
ome kind of divine, or diabolical,
genius seems to have taken possession of Dafoe while
making “Shadow of the Vampire.” In his
other work, he is merely excellent, one of the dozen or
so most reliably interesting actors to watch. He turns
in a customarily good job in “Auto Focus” (2002), which dredges more recent
history to bring us the story of actor Bob Crane, whose
day in the sun came (and went) with
“Hogan’s Heroes”, a TV sitcom set in
a German prisoner-of-war camp, which ran from 1965 to
1971. Crane is played by Greg Kinnear, who has one of
the most likable personas in the movie business today.
He is disarmingly easy-going and whenever he’s
onscreen you find yourself saying, “Okay,
I’ll go along for this ride,” and, before
you know it, you’re deeply involved with the
character he’s portraying. This may strike
traditionalists as blasphemous, but a case is being
slowly and solidly built that Crane is today’s
Jimmy Stewart. This movie presents Crane as a similarly
likable person who, when faced with temptation, says,
“Okay, I’ll go along for the ride,”
and, before he knows it, he is deeply involved with a
character – John Carpenter, a creepy gadget geek
played by Dafoe – and a lifestyle of rampant
promiscuity that ultimately sucks him down into a
maelstrom of degradation and death.
Carpenter shows
Crane how to use the then-new technology of video
cameras to make instant home movies of his sexual
escapades. They establish a symbiotic relationship in
which Carpenter provides the technical equipment and
know-how, and Crane, by virtue of his celebrity status,
provides the chicks – for both of them. The late
‘60s and early ‘70s were a good time to be
a Casanova: after the birth control pill, before AIDS,
and right in the middle of one of those sexual
revolutions that always seem to accompany and follow
war (the Viet Nam war, in this case).
The movie handles
this flammable material with a light touch – and
asbestos gloves. It could easily have degenerated into
a soft (or hard) porn flick, or a heavy-handed sermon,
but it avoids both these traps. Nevertheless, it
presents us with a cautionary tale, all the more
effective for its restraint.
Early on, we see
Crane with his wife (played by Rita Wilson), a devout
Catholic who is quite attractive but a bit starchy. She
obviously wants to have sex with her husband but
doesn’t really know how to be sexy. She is a
tragic figure, like everyone else here, rather than a
cartoon character. She inadvertently pushes Crane away
while Carpenter and his floozies pull, and the result
is that Crane leaves his proper orbit of domestic
sexuality and veers off into a meteoric blaze that
eventually crashes into the sun.
One of the
interesting things about this story is the subtext of
homo-erotic attraction between Carpenter and Crane.
It’s made clear, early on, that Carpenter’s
sexuality is a little ambiguous. While reviewing one of
their home movies with Carpenter, Crane says,
“Hey, wait a minute. What’s that on my ass?
Hey, it’s your hand! What the hell was that all
about?” (or words to that effect) Carpenter tries
to laugh it off as part of the spirit of the orgy, but
it’s clear that he’s disappointed that
Crane didn’t get into the same spirit of
polymorphous perversity. The movie makes the point
subtly but unmistakably that Carpenter is infatuated
with Crane. And he’s devastated later when Crane
announces that he is getting off the sexual tread mill
in order to repair his life and career. That same night
Crane is murdered in a motel room while he sleeps, and
it is strongly implied that Carpenter was the killer.
But what of
Crane’s orientation? You have to ask yourself
(and I think the movie wants us to ask it): why would a
man have sex with hundreds of different women but
always in front of the same man? Neither one of them
can see whatever it is that is so forcefully leading
them to their doom. Consequently, they can do nothing
to protect themselves.
One of the opening
scenes of the movie has Crane in his disc jockey booth
at KNX radio in LA, about to interview Clayton Moore,
the actor who played the Lone Ranger in the
long-running TV show. Crane jokes with his audience
about how they will unmask him on air. The scene
resonates nicely as a portent. The Lone Ranger and
Tonto stand directly behind Crane and Carpenter.
(Don’t bend over, guys. Hey, just kidding.) The
swingers’ lonely, episodic, action-filled
adventures are as arid, ultimately, as the old Western.
The movie unmasks Crane, but only for an audience with
a good imagination, the same kind who can see
what’s happening on the radio.
