Think of the outrageous ego of the vampire. He thinks
himself so important that he is willing to live forever, even under the lifeless
circumstances forced by his condition. Avoiding the sun, sleeping in coffins,
feared by everyone, he nurses his dislikes. In “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” the
1992 film by Francis Ford Coppola, the vampire rages at heaven and vows to wait
forever for the return of the woman he loves. It does not come to his thoughts
that after the first two or three centuries he might not seem at all attractive
to her.
The film is inspired by the original Bram Stoker
novel, despite the author’s name being in the title for another reason (Another
studio owns the rights to Dracula). It starts, as it should, with the
tragic story of Vlad the Impaler, who went off to fight the Crusades and
returned to find that his beloved wife, hearing he was dead, had committed
suicide. Roger Ebert said in his review, “And not just killed herself, but
hurled herself from a parapet to a stony doom far below, in one of the many
spectacular shots which are the best part of this movie.”
Vlad cannot see the justice in his fate. Ebert mentioned,
“He has marched all the way to the Holy Land on God's business, only to have
God play this sort of a trick on him. (Vlad is apparently not a student of the
Book of Job.) He embraces Satan and vampirism, and the action moves forward to
the late Victorian Age, when mankind is first beginning to embrace the gizmos
(phonographs, cameras, the telegraph, motion pictures) that will dispel the
silence of the nights through which he has waited fearfully for centuries.”
Ebert continued, “Coppola's plot, from a screenplay by
James V. Hart, exists precisely between London, where this modern age is just
dawning, and Transylvania, which still sleeps unhealthily in the past.” We meet
a young attorney, played by Keanu Reeves, who has been asked to go to Dracula’s
castle to arrange certain real estate transactions. The previous person who was
sent on this task ran into some sort of difficulties…health or something…everything
is vague…
Reeves’ carriage, driven by a man whose hands are
claws, races at the edges of heights until he is finally discharged in the
darkness to be met and taken to Dracula’s castle. There, everything is more or
less as we expect it, only much more so. Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) waits here
as he has for centuries for the return of his dead bride, and when he sees a
photograph of Reeves’ fiancée, Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), he knows his wait
has been rewarded at last. She lives again.
Back in London, we meet other characters, including
the fearless vampire killer Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins),
and Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), a free spirit who has three suitors and is
Mina’s best friend. Ebert said, “When Dracula appears in town, Van Helsing's
antenna start to quiver.” Then the movie starts a party of visual corruption, where
what people do is not nearly as dishonored as how they look while they do them.
Coppola directs with all the stops out, and the actors
perform as if afraid they will not be heard on the other televisions of the
world. Ebert noted, “The sets are grand opera run riot - Gothic extravaganza
intercut with the Victorian London of gaslights and fogbound streets, rogues in
top hats and bad girls in bustiers.” Keanu Reeves, as a serious young man of
the future, hardly knows what he’s up against with Count Dracula, and neither
do we since Dracula happily changes form – from a century-looking geriatric to
a presentable young man to a cat and a bat and a wolf.
Ebert noted, “Vampire movies, which run in the face of
all scientific logic, are always heavily laden with pseudo-science. Hopkins
lectures learnedly on the nosferatu, yet himself seems capable of teleportation
and other tricks not in the physics books.” Ryder’s character finds herself being
under the terrible spell of the vampire’s need. Many women are enthralled when
a man says he has been waiting his entire life for them. However, if he has been
waiting four centuries? Ebert noted, “The one thing the movie lacks is headlong
narrative energy and coherence.” There is no story we can follow well enough to
care about.
There is a chronology of events, as the characters
travel back and forth from London to Transylvania, and rendezvous in bedrooms
and graveyards. However, Coppola seems more worried about sight and set pieces
than with storytelling. Ebert noted, “The movie is particularly operatic in the
way it prefers climaxes to continuity.”
Ebert admitted, “Faced with narrative confusions and
dead ends (why does Dracula want to buy those London properties in such
specific locations?), I enjoyed the movie simply for the way it looked and
felt.” Production designers Dante Ferreti and Thomas Sanders have outdone
themselves. The cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, gets into the spirit so
completely that he always seems to light with shadows.
Oldman, Ryder, and Hopkins breathe with enthusiasm. Ebert
ended his review by admitting, “The movie is an exercise in feverish excess,
and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.”
So many shots, if not all of them, look like something
you would want to post all over your walls. It looks amazing and seems to fit
with the time. The movie falls the novel closer than a lot of other adaptations
since it is told as a series of vignettes, much like the novel tells the story
in diary entries and point-of-views from the different characters. Even though
the look of Dracula is silly and funny looking, this film is one to be seen. I
saw it on Netflix when I was exercising, but you can currently watch this for
free on Pluto TV. Check it out if you haven’t because this is one adaptation
that you shouldn’t skip over.
Look out on Monday when I review another novel adaptation in “Halloween Month 2023.”
No comments:
Post a Comment