Francis Ford Coppola’s visually dazzling version of Dracula, the often-filmed vampire tale, is titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, indicating the director’s wish to be as faithful as possible to the literary source material, which was first published in 1897.
Grade: A- (**** out of *****)
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Theatrical release poster
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With the exception of the very young, most audiences have seen at least one screen or stage adaptation of the noted novel. Film-viewers may be most familiar with the 1931 version of Dracula, which made Bela Lugosi a household word and forever shaped the conventions of the horror film.
Coppola goes out of his way to make a more “accurate” and “timelier,” yet stylish movie. His Dracula is an excessively gory and violent rendition, a film experience for the senses rather than the mind. Stressing the erotic aspects of Stoker’s work, by graphically depicting sexual fantasies and nightmares, the chief storyline and the characters sometimes get lost. As a result, what we evidence onscreen is something like Coppola’s reflections on the Dracula mythology rather than an emotionally engaging narrative.
In a recent interview, Coppola is quoted as saying that he always wanted to be Woody Allen, meaning, I think, a director who makes intimate, small-scale films that would express his personal vision. Fortunately, Coppola is not an Allen-type director–his rich oeuvre, including Dracula–demonstrates an unparalleled versatility in genre, content, and style.
Coppola’s Dracula is in fact exactly the opposite of an Allen endeavor: a big, over-stylized film that consists of numerous set-pieces and some stunning visual effects. His new picture is a cold, impersonal, and detached enterprise that deep down may reflect its filmmaker’s ambition to make a huge commercial hit. Coppola has not had a big success in over a decade, though some of his “smaller” films (most notably the underestimated Vietnam film Gardens of Stone) were interesting in their own right.
Winona Ryder, who plays the dual role of Elisabetha and Mina, manages to build a coherent role and to project her personality into it.
The versatile British actor Gary Oldman, who plays Count Dracula, shines throughout, relying on heavy Romanian accent and make-up to match.
In 1931, Bela Lugosi was a scary and truly frightening Dracula, and in 1979, Frank Langella was suave and elegantly seductive. In Coppola’s version, Oldman registers the animalistic masculinity and erotic charisma as well as the vulnerability of his character, which make him irresistibly alluring to all of these women.
This Dracula is clearly not about acting, for even the usually dependable Anthony Hopkins, who won the Oscar Award last year and is cast here as Van Helsing, doesn’t excel. Still, the sight of Hopkins carrying the heads of some dead men and the brutality of his character resulted in laughs in the screening I attended, because they reminded audiences of the role he played in Jonathan Demme’s horror film, The Silence of the Lambs.
The film shows evidence of brilliance on a technical level. The transitions between scenes and the intercutting within scenes is at oncesmooth and haunting. The movie contains flawless dissolves and seamless montage and superimpositions.
The second part of the film is more touching and more involving. Here, Coppola effectively conveys the doomed love between Dracula and Elisabetha, and later between him and Mina.
There is such graphic display of sexuality and discussion of infected blood, that this movie may also be read as a metaphor about the AIDS epidemics.
Everything in the film is big–and self-conscious–as if Coppola set out to prove that he could make a horror film in tune with the requirements of commercial cinema today. This Dracula owes its existence to an extremely sophisticated film technology over which Coppola has total mastery; it could not have been made a decade ago.
The director must have instructed his inventive cinematographer, the German Michael Ballhaus (who has worked with Scorsese, Jarmusch and others), to keep his camera really near the actors and the action.
In some scenes, the camera is so close to the actors that I felt claustrophobia. This style deviates from Coppola’s more complex and open mise-en-scene in his best movies (The Godfather, The Conversation), in which the images are not fixed. But Dracula’s heavy reliance on mega-close-ups forces the viewers to watch what the director had determined for them to watch.
In tribute to German Expressionism, Coppola uses Gothic style, presenting a distorted perception of reality, one in which there is no realistic ratio between the size of human beings and that of objects. Ballhaus’ camera often switches from extreme low-angle shots, which magnify the ominous castle in Transylvania, to extreme high-angle shots, that tend to dwarf the human characters.
In his push toward authenticity, Mina and her fiancé Jonathan Harker (played by Keanu Reeves) read the entries that they record in their diaries. Their narration provides the necessary transition from Transylvania to England, even if it also increases the distance between the viewers and the screen.
In its level of energy, intensity, and raw sensuality, Dracula reminded me of the Batman movies; these films are never boring because so much is happening all the time. You may have read about the “fine-tuning” and “scaling back” of the film, after its first previews. I haven’t seen the previous version, but judging by what’s on screen now I can say that its nightmarish quality, bloodletting, and gory violence are justifiably excessive; the scenes involving Lucy’s turning into a vampire may remind you of Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
I had fun recently, when I screened (in a film class) Tod Browning’s 1931 version, which is only 76 minute long, alongside with Coppola’s ambitious and grandiose movie, basting a running time of 123 minutes.
In conclusion, Coppola made one of the greatest Dracula films ever with his 1992 adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel.
The film is widely praised for its stylistic approach to the gothic horror genre with Gary Oldman’s performance being a stand-out.
Oldman plays different variations of the titular Count throughout the film, from Vlad the Impaler to the weakened older version to the steampunk-styled Dracula who walks the streets of London.
His switching between incarnations of Dracula demonstrates Gary Oldman’s versatility even when playing the same part.
Cast
Gary Oldman as Count Dracula / Vlad the Impaler
Winona Ryder as Mina Harker / Elisabeta
Anthony Hopkins as Professor Abraham Van Helsing/Priest/ Narrator
Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker
Richard E. Grant as Dr. Jack Seward
Cary Elwes as Lord Arthur Holmwood
Billy Campbell as Quincey P. Morris
Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra
Tom Waits as R. M. Renfield
Jay Robinson as Mr. Hawkins
Monica Bellucci as Dracula’s Bride
Michaela Bercu as Dracula’s Bride
Florina Kendrick as Dracula’s Bride
Credits:
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay by James V. Hart, Based on Dracula by Bram Stoker
Produced by Coppola, Fred Fuchs, Charles Mulvehill
Cinematography Michael Ballhaus
Edited by Nicholas C. Smith, Glen Scantlebury, Anne Goursaud
Music by Wojciech Kilar
Production companies: American Zoetrope, Osiris Films
Distributed by Columbia Pictures
Release date: November 13, 1992
Running time: 128 minutes
Budget $40 million
Box office $215.9 million
