"Lives for the master"

Rating: 4/10 (18 December 2011)

The story of Dracula has become the keystone horror for each generation of movie makers. From the 1922 German expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu, one of the earliest true horrors, to the 1931 Universal Studios effort that made a star of Bela Lugosi, to the lurid series beginning in 1958 that would become the backbone of Hammer studios, the tale has been repeatedly reinvented for the tastes of each era. And so it continues to this 1992 version produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the godfather of American New Wave cinema.
The full title of this adaptation is "Bram Stoker's Dracula", so Coppola obviously felt a need to emphasise the picture's roots in its source novel. It is true that this version takes much from the novel that the earlier ones leave out – the vampire's ability to transform into various animals, spoken extracts from the diary entries that make up the book's text, although this latter only really serves to highlight some of Stoker's occasionally substandard prose. But it also adds a lot of stuff that is not in the novel, at least not explicitly. Stoker made some references to the real historical figure Vlad the Impaler, but this adaptation makes it overt, and even suggests that Mina is the reincarnation of Vlad's wife. This allows for an emotional and romantic angle that is strangely effective. Coppola and his writing team also gives the story a flagrant sexuality. There is nothing wrong with this per se, yet it often seems cheap the way it is presented and inserted into scenes, like the audience-pleasing smut of an exploitation flick.
There are some unusual choices among the cast members. It was risky casting Keanu Reeves in a vampire movie, because there must have been a chance someone would try to hammer him through Gary Oldman's heart. There are numerous layers to his badness here – he is wooden when calm, unconvincing when angered, incapable of an English accent, and pulling of laughable facial expressions. His awfulness serves to distract us from the mere mediocrity of other players like Cary Elwes and Sadie Frost. Anthony Hopkins gives us a Van Helsing with dramatic substance, perhaps a bit out of touch with the movie's extrovert tones, but brilliantly deadpan in several moments of comic relief. It is however only Gary Oldman in the title role and a wonderful Tom Waits as Renfield who really seem to get into the proper spirit of things, both of them hamming it up fabulously.
And yes, this is very much a picture of style over substance. Indeed that is really its one saviour. It's something Coppola is good at as a director. There's a breathtaking atmosphere that is often closer to fantasy than horror. Coppola deliberately used old-fashioned special effects, some of which directly reference German silent movies (the rising ring of fire can be seen in the 1926 Faust), and it's nice to see these tricks – each completely seamless – used once more before CGI achieved total dominance. There's also a fantastic sense of rhythm, with crafty cross-cutting building the final chase to a crescendo. The stylised look is reminiscent of the Jean Cocteau directed Beauty and the Beast (1946) – constantly flowing cinematography and dreamlike imagery, something which only works in the context of the fantastical, nightmarish subject matter.
And yet despite Coppola's noble efforts to recapture some of the spirit of both the original novel and the aesthetics of his cinematic forebears, there is much about his Dracula that is low and weak – the tawdry sex references, the corny dialogue, the seeming inability to allow a creepy sequence to play out without extrovert shocker moments (the scene where Oldman shaves Reeves would be brilliantly suspenseful if it wasn't for its having three or four ridiculous climaxes). And these really are all common problems of the modern horror movie (despite how much everyone claims to love The Shining with its slow tension, its influence has been negligible). Just like the famous Dracula movies that went before, this one is very much representative of the horror movies of its age.