Film Review: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
A Look Back at Coppola's Take on the Classic Vampire Tale
Jun 15, 2009
With enough carnally inclined and blatantly abstinent vampires to go around, television and film execs. can serve up vampire fever suitable for all ages - with corresponding social messages attached. But before these profitable creatures of the night got framed up for social allegories, they were just about bloodsucking good fun and, in many cases, great cinema.
Perhaps "great cinema" isn't the best transition to lead right into Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film, Bram Stoker's Dracula. However, with True Blood returning for its second season this past Sunday and New Moon fever recently sparked by the emergence of a teaser trailer, it seems as fitting a time as any to look back on Coppola's maddeningly bizarre, and oft pulpy, take on the classic vampire tale.
Pardon the pun (and the language) -- Coppola's Dracula is bat-sh-t crazy. Well, at least most of the time.
Coppola's Cinematic Lust
Just as Coppola's contemporary Martin Scorsese went B-movie/Hitchcock crazy one year earlier with his rendition of Cape Fear, Coppola pulls out all the visual stops (including Scorsese collaborator, cinematographer Michael Ballhaus) for Dracula. Instead of sending up Hitchcock, though, the man behind the Godfather series looked back further to German Expressionism for his inspiration.
He includes heavy nods to F.W. Murnau's silent-masterpiece, Nosferatu, which was a copyright evading take on Stoker's story. The intense shifts in color and lighting almost suggests the practice of color-tinted film used in the silent era -- the overt iris ins and outs and silent-style imitated footage more than confirms the influence. As a giddy sort of appreciation of Nosferatu and early film technique, Dracula is stunning. It is every bit a worthy and necessary counterbalance to Werner Herzog's sober, and far more brilliant, re-imagining of Murnau's film, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht.
A Symphony Of Colors, Not Story
Where Coppola -- the master of seamless transitions a la Godfather II -- gets seriously tripped up is in the narrative (and Keanu Reeves, but more on that later). The editing and pacing of Dracula ranges from inspired to downright sloppy. The attempt to weave together (at least) five characters' narrations via diary entries and other letters deadens the film severely. Coppola and Ballhaus's frenetic camera coupled and the Oscar-nominated art direction says so much more than the stale voice-overs.
If the original Nosferatu was a "symphony of terror" (the film's subtitle), then, with a little more focus, Dracula could have be a symphony of colors -- burnt red skies, green tinted abattoirs and and absinthe parlors, ashen paved London. The film is as visually inspired and unhinged as they come. But Coppola and screenwriter James V. Hart never really commit to one direction or the other, which admittedly is part of the fun of Dracula as much as it is its undoing.
In forcing carnality from subtext to front-and-center motif, Hart and Coppola never really explore much in the vampire-sex relationship. There's a great deal of supernatural female writhing (Mr. Skin trivia fans, keep your eyes peeled for a young, bloodsucking Monica Belluci), brought on by the sexual aura of Dracula, but really, the film has very little to say about sexual repression and release that wasn't already said (quietly) in Murnau's film 70 years earlier.
Keanu Reeves - That Which Is Truly Dead
A lot of the acting in Dracula hasn't exactly aged well either, save for a few strong turns. Gary Oldman delivers the best of the lot, although all the Emperor Palpatine makeup in the world doesn't make him half as scary as Max Schreck or half as tragic as Klaus Kinski, both former Nosferatus. Tom Waits is deviously entertaining as the Count's imprisoned servant, Mr. Renfield. His screen presence gels with the lunacy of Coppola's approach to the material and makes you wish the director had really gone full blown with his ideas.
Putting Reeves in one of the leads was an awful, energy sapping mistake. His blank-faced Jonathan Harker is thankfully absent from the middle chunk of the film, replaced by Oldman and the Mrs. Harker in waiting, an appropriately desirable Winona Ryder. The late-in-the-game appearance of Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Van Helsing pumps some more life into the cast, which largely plays second fiddle to the wild cinematography.
In Memory Of Bloody Good Fun
At the time of Dracula's release, much was said about the connection between the tainted blood plot thread and the real-life AIDS epidemic. Regardless of whether or not that was Coppola and/or Hart's intention, Dracula isn't about lofty philosophical statements. It's about the joy of filmmaking.
As time passes and computer generated images and digital color correction continues to flood the silver screen, Dracula, as imperfect as it is, will become more and more fascinating, if only for the overpowering strength of its in-camera effects. Like the character it portrays, the film is an artifact, carrying the flag for a generation of filmmaking that feels exponentially more distant every year.
