Drained

Rating: Null/10 (21 May 2003)

Spoilers herein.
It must be difficult, being an aging wunderkind where both your own inertia and that of your sponsors drives toward ever-reduced risk. Further, imagine the additional pressure of being near bankruptcy because of extreme business incompetence. What to do? What to do?
Make a film that dummies will sponsor because they think audiences are dummies. Pick a subject that DEMANDS a trashy treatment. For the girl, get that girl from `Beetlejuice.' The doctor, that doctor from `Elephant Man;' the `boy' that dumb kid from Bill and Ted's party. A Dracula requires breasts and brilliant red hair, ideally on the same body so just do it. This way you can camp it up without penalty and do some `serious' filmmaking in the background when no one is watching.
The problem is that Coppola isn't a well rounded filmmaker. He is in the Italian storytelling tradition (with Scorcese). That mode invests everything in character; all situations, all the notions of `seeing', every visual excess is built around that notion of the individual driving fate. It was a success with `Godfather' because it breathed new life into a tired genre and invested Italian characters with their own world.
The excesses here are intolerable, precisely because he fights Stoker's key notion: that fate drives the characters, not the other way around.
`No matter,' we can imagine him saying, as long as I do my intelligent stuff in the background. Katz/Merhige would later successfully develop the notion he uses here of the `shadow" of the vampire in the film of that name which is deeply self-referential: films about films, representations about representations. Coppola does a childish version here:

A dozen times or so we have the film itself as a shadow puppet play, merging into use of Dracula's shadow and further into both his other forms and the use of shadow overall. In another project, I might be awed by how manifold this is, and how well integrated. But in fact, the folds are integrated with neither themselves or the story, and especially not the shadows of the film itself (as was the case with `Shadows'). Incidentally, `Shadow' was produced by Coppola's equally blunt nephew, but he wisely kept an arm's length.

He does do a clever thing with the notion of film itself. As Dracula comes to London, the nature of the film turns into a zoetrope which is both the name of Coppola's (financially troubled) studio and is featured in this same scene where Dracula meets Mina. Get it? The world of the imaginary meets the world of the real? Note that the staging is copied from a similar scene, with similar intent, in `Chaplin' of the same year by buddy Attenborough.

The scene where Hopkins draws a circle of fire around himself to ward off temptation by the devil (including sex) is a direct reference to buddy Scorses's scene in `Last Temptation of Christ' which dealt with precisely the same thing. In fact, he is using the same cinematographer.

Because the red hair means closer to the supernatural, Lucy is the first to go. Watch closely as Mina discovers Dracula (as a beast) ravishing Lucy in the garden. As he looks at Mina, his gaze turns her hair red. It is a pretty complicated effect that she doesn't exploit.

All this motion, and none of it particularly intelligent, none of it coherent. It gives the impression that someone drained all the blood out of Coppola.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.