Exalted, sumptuous, sensuous trompe l'oeil Dracula

Rating: 10/10 (15 May 2014)

Coppola's take on the Stoker idiom will compel you to watch again and again, as this film is so masterful and ingenious that even its flaws become attributes like the errors woven into fine Persian rugs. Oldman was born to play the ambivalent, eternal count, here sometimes depicted as a near-Eastern wise man. Coppola wryly uses the film as a quotation device for other fine tellings of Dracula, such as in the scenes in which Oldman as Dracula jack-in-the-boxes out of coffins (riffing on Max Schreck in "Nosferatu"). The film's HIV metaphors work brilliantly, and Anthony Hopkins' occasionally off-kilter Van Helsing provides welcome comic relief. Keanu Reaves's performance as Jonathan Harker is dunderheaded enough to be oddly endearing. Michael Ballhaus's cinematography is an utter profusion of saturated colors with semiotic significance, and the old-style matte and optical special effects make CGI seem stagey, acerbic and bloodless by comparison. This may be the best art-directed film ever to come out of Hollywood, and Eiko Ishioka's costumes burn messages and motifs into the unconscious. Cary Elwes, Richard Grant, and Billy Campbell play an odd troika of unlike fellows who find thrilling common cause in fighting Dracula. Coppola features two fine debut turns from women whose performances seem larger than life: Sadie Frost as the vibrant but vulnerable Lucy, and Monica Bellucci as a lovely but fiendishly eroticized Dracula bride. Tom Waits stuns as Renfield. A resounding, enthusiastic and bombastic 10 stars.