Oldman's Professionalism Outweighs All

Rating: 4/10 (23 August 2006)

I have an astonishing confession to make: I have never actually read the book written by Bram Stoker. However, I do have a vague idea of how the story goes. There's this alarmingly mysterious character that lives in a castle in Transylvania who goes by Count Dracula. He possessed some dude he met named Renfield to secretly find some victims with fresh, delicious blood and to eat nothing but insects and thrive on their souls. Dracula picks the wrong girl to bite (Lucy) and after her health and behavior become questionable (along with Renfield's actions), her peers seek the help of Professor Van Helsing, not a Broadway-loving Australian but a doctor who specializes in the abnormal. Lucy dies and rises again as a bloodsucker, only to be murdered again by the VH crew. Van Helsing says she was the victim of a vampire and that the ringleader of the vampires must be killed for this chaos to end. They figure out it's Dracula, and after a heated battle, a stake is driven through Dracula's heart, thus putting an end to his terrorizing, and everybody else live happily ever after. (I'd like to thank my clearest source, the Mel Brooks film Dracula: Dead and Loving It.) This film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, succeeds in educating the audience about the mostly unmentioned, and therefore unknown, elements of the story, but its weakness of containing a mostly undevoted, undedicated, and cluelessly unaware cast damn near overpowers any knowledge that can be learned by having the audience focus on glaring errors rather than interesting tidbits.
The most horrible work is brought to the table by that often-mocked thespian Keanu Reeves. The man of "Whoa!" plays Jonathan Harker, an Englishman who takes it upon himself to investigate Dracula's castle and is held captive for quite a while. Read that sentence again. Keanu Reeves plays an Englishman. Imagine Reeves not even trying to discipline his surfer ways and deliver lines in a British dialect. Now multiply that monstrosity by two, and you have his laughable performance. Still can't imagine it? Read this line aloud: "I've seen where the bawsterd sleeps!" Also, I suppose out of fright and terror, Harker's hair turns white, which looks ridiculous with Reeves' golden tanned face. In Reeves' defense, I will say this: These days, he has at least shown a little improvement in his movies since Dracula.
To be blunt, the actors that disappointed me a bit more than Keanu were the dread pirate Cary Elwes (as one of three guys who wanted to get in bed with Lucy) and respected Oscar-winning thespian Sir Anthony Hopkins, who played Van Helsing. Before I dis Elwes' performance, I will say he has done much worse (see Saw), but Dracula is another example of his bad habit of overacting from time to time. Perhaps he was trying to upstage the other two horndogs after Lucy; ultimately, none of the three are interesting in the least. As for Hopkins, he disappoints his new found fans from his first go at Hannibal Lector by taking a juicy role like Van Helsing and sleep-acting throughout the film.
The best performance of the film belongs to Gary Oldman (surprise, surprise) as the title role. His dialect actually sounds Transylvanian, as opposed to Bela Lugosi's more famous Hungarian dialect, and he brings the perfect doses of sensuality and blasphemous vengeance to the role. My favorite scene is in the beginning, when the not yet undead Dracula, a warrior returning from battle, finds his love (Winona Ryder, briefly playing Elisabeta) has committed suicide and takes the matter personally, in powerful anger, with God. Oldman, through an odd mix of hatred and sympathy, has the audience eating from the palm of his hand from that point on, and he delivers his tortured lines in another language! Watching the movie, I actually felt sorry that the phenomenal actor put more thought, research, and heart into the film than anybody else in the cast and the director did. Had this been a better movie, Oldman would have better roles on his resume and more nominations under his belt.
Tom Waits, who plays bug-munching Renfield, is always delightfully mad fun, but I wish he had more scenes. As for Ryder, her Mina participates in some great seductive chemistry with Oldman, but her scenes with Keanu slump in appeal. Finally, Sadie Frost, who does a fine job of moaning, rubbing herself, and showing her bare chest as Lucy, would have had a great career in porn after this movie if she had pursued it - too bad I don't remember or recognize anything else she has done (I know, I know; she was married to Jude Law once. So what?).
Oscars were received for the costumes and sound editing, and while the costumes were creative and colorful, they did not seem to match the realism the film was going for. The award-winning makeup for the vampires was absolutely astounding and reminded me of much later creatures made for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. On the other hand, to make the film all the more uneven, the visual effects and set design were sadly dated, relying on tricks from the '60s, like black silhouettes battling in front of a red-lit backdrop. Overall, the movie is heavily weighted down by its faults, but thanks to Oldman, this bat is still barely in flight.