(almost) Bram Stoker's

Rating: 7/10 (19 October 2004)

This is supposed to be the most exact adaptation of Bram Stoker's masterpiece, and there's no doubt that Coppola's "Dracula" has much more to do with the novel than Todd Browning's, Terence Fisher's, Murnau's, Herzog's, or any of the most remarkable films about the Nosferatu... I supposed it was Coppola's aim to do it that way. So, why did he make up that love-story between Dracula and Mina Harker? There's no such thing in the novel. Did he do that in order to make his film more commercial? Was it a Hollywood imposition? I assume that it is impossible to recreate chapter by chapter that great novel (they'd need to make a 5 or 6 hour long movie), but you can't add things to such a masterpiece. I mean, are you making an adaptation or are you not? Browning or Fisher didn't called their movies "Bram Stoker's Dracula", because they knew their movies hadn't nothing to do with the novel; and I think Coppola's shouldn't have called his Dracula as Bram Stoker's.
OK, once I've make clear that this is not an EXACT adaptation of the story let's talk about the movie itself: Coppola made an outstanding job with the technical part, the photography is just perfect, the colours, the shadows, the atmospheres, the special effects... The movie has such rhythm (except for those scenes that develop Dracula and Mina's lovestory, which are rather hackneyed and sickly), and they made a nice job with the script (Dracula is a novel based on diaries, letters, etc. so it was not easy to convert that into a cinema script). These are the good things about Coppola's adaptation. Now the bad things: again, that love story; the character of Van Helsing is much more rude and reckless than Stoker's creation (although Anthony Hopkins plays it in the best possible way); the characters of Quincey, Seward, and Goldmig aren't properly developed, also they failed to recreate the love and the friendship among those characters... and last, but not least, I don't like the work of Winona Ryder (her performance is such ridiculous in some scene such as that one beneath Dracula's castle) nor Keanu Reeves' (couldn't he be a little more expressionless???).
PS: Maybe I'm being too harsh judging those things in relation to the novel adaptation (the characters, the mistakes...), but Dracula is one of my favourite novels ever, so I can't be very tolerant about it :D.
My rate: 7/10