Not What the Title Implies

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 1999)

One of the great novels of the English speaking world is Bram Stoker's DRACULA. Although filmed too many times to count, and burdened by the trappings of too many bad films that almost make it camp, there is a richness and quality to the book that has never been captured. Although Coppola makes a good stab here, restoring characters like Arthur, and trying to go by the book (the Bela Lugosi version was based on a play, as was the Frank Langella version), the script strays too far. The biggest problem is an attempt to compromise with evil. We forget how up-to-date the novel was because it was written 100 years ago. But Mina used a typewriter; Dr. Seward kept his journal on phonograph records; Jonathan Harker referred in the novel to the modern 19th century. Characters thought themselves as modern and up to date and civilized as we do today. Dracula is a power figure, slowing showing himself as vastly evil, and he is transported from the rustic mountains of his homeland to (what was to the book's first readers) a modern, non-superstitious, workaday metropolis in England. It's probably impossible to recapture that spirit in a movie because of moviegoers' preconceptions. Nevertheless, the backstory (ridiculous whether there's a grain of truth to it or not; you cannot really draw dots to connect Vald the Impaler with the Stoker's powerful Count) and the threads from it running through the story arc, detracts from the story. In the book Dracula starts out an avuncular figure who evolves into a fearsome vampire, with a mixed crew of thoroughly modern people -- including a psychiatrist, a solicitor, a secretary, and several upper-class party-people -- reluctantly finding themselves as the ones with the burden to rid the world of the evil. Coppola compromises with evil. Yet a vampire is, by nature, a soulless body that subsists by drinking the blood of the living, and multiplying its kind. Dracula is one of the most powerful figures in all literature, and the evil he represents transcends merely individual bloodsucking. That Coppola chooses to give us a kinder, gentler Dracula, and chooses to make compromises with evil (he may be a bloodsucking monster, but he has feelings!) in a way that may be indicative of society as a whole, but which perverts Stoker's entire point and inverts his characters, making Dracula "misunderstood" and those out to destroy them as self-righteous prigs.
The movie's cast is varied. Anthony Hopkins is extremely over the top as van Helsing, but gives a good performance for all his fireworks (I suppose one who spends his nights hunting vampires is entitled to be a little looney). Tom Waits was a brilliant casting choice. Keanu is the only actor who seems totally lost at sea, and weighted down by his phoney English accent.
The cinematography is the only part of the movie that works. Although Coppola's camera-tricks become a bit tiresome the fifth or sixth time you've seen them, "Dracula" is a beautifully photographed movie.

One despairs of ever seeing a version of "Dracula" that truly does present Stoker's story. The Louis Jourdan version, half-videotaped, is far superior to this, and Jourdan doesn't appear as the kindly old host at the beginning, and the character of Arthur is, as usual, lost. Judi Bowker, however, is a far superior Mina than the pouting Winona Ryder.