Masterful piece of horror and romance.

Rating: 10/10 (16 June 2009)

There is a moment, around thirty minutes from the end of Francis Ford Coppola's film, when Mina Harker drinks from the blood of Count Dracula, an act that in the space of the same moment mixes brazen sexuality with blood curdling horror for the Count soon turns into a hideous bat like creature before dissolving into a pile of rats. It's a scene that encapsulates the romance, the beauty and the ugliness that is the cornerstone of the movie. The first thing I should really say about this film is how much I love it. To me it is a superb slice of film-making from a man who, at this point in his career and twenty years after the masterpiece that put him on the map, was not regarded as highly as he once was, at least in terms of the films he was currently making at that time. Certainly his previous film, prior to this, was the third installment of his Godfather series and that was a film that divided just about everybody based on whether or not it was a necessary film, to plot developments right through to the casting of the actress playing Al Pacino's daughter.
Admittedly, and I will be the first one to say so, there are some issues here to be had. Some of the performances, or more so, the accents of some of the performers leave a lot to be desired, and yes, I'm looking at you Keanu Reeves. There are moments where one does expect an utterance of the line "it's the Count dude", and while, thankfully, we never get that, it says a lot about said accent that no matter how many times one watches this film, you can't help but expect it. The whole aura of the film also feels over the top at times, the bloodletting, the overt sexuality (Sadie Frost's performance as Lucy comes across as a walking orgasm for most of the film, but this only seems to add to the fun considering the character comes across as nymphomaniac even before she becomes a vampire) and Anthony Hopkins' accent, but it works in the spirit of the film. What does work triumphantly well are the performances of the two leads. Gary Oldman, probably one of the best actors working today in film, and Winona Ryder, forever and always my favourite actress despite her inability, supposedly, to pay for her shopping, sell the love story of Dracula and Mina in a way that is almost heartbreaking beyond belief, with furtive glances, genuinely moving chemistry without resorting to playing it in a "I want to remove your clothes now" sort of a way, is backed by sensitive direction from Coppola and a terrific music score that never intrudes and tells the audience how to feel, instead complimenting the emotion on screen. Winona's performance is beautiful and understated, as always, selling you her character's feelings and thoughts without overplaying it, whilst Oldman, seemingly, until the Christopher Nolan Batman films came along, forever and always playing villains, actually gives us a villain, although not as black and white as that description would suggest, that you want to root for, a man who has fallen into darkness based on an emotional loss that in turn places all those he comes into contact with into a similar place but who eventually fulfils a redemption in those haunting, final moments.
The best performance could be held over for Francis Ford Coppola, here working as a director for hire in a studio film, but making it, as he always has done, through his own personal eyes. Instead of relying on modern technology available at the time, Coppola utilized old fashioned filming techniques and technology that was only available during the birth of cinema to present his vision of the tale. Old fashioned models, in camera trickery with not even a whiff of CGI. It's refreshing and original and brilliant. Of course not everyone will speak of the film in the same breath as the Corelone's or the Kurtz's but to me this is a crowning achievement, despite some bad judgments (again, I look to you Keanu Reeves), from a director who we all have to thank for the cinema that we have. At the time of writing (2009), horror has become a genre that is creatively dying, with torture porn and remakes of films that really shouldn't be remade when they were already good to begin with. Here we have an adaptation of a piece of work that has been made so many times, yet here it feels fresh and original, almost new. How many horror films, or even better yet, romantic films, can say that in this day and age?