Coppola's pastiche.

Rating: 3/10 (17 February 2005)

I see that IMDb calls this movie *Dracula*. In my day, it was known as *BRAM STOKER'S Dracula*. Perhaps Stoker's estate litigated at some point during the past 13 years? -- for this movie certainly isn't Bram Stoker's *Dracula*. It is entirely Francis Ford Coppola's *Dracula*. I mean, I commend Coppola on assigning the correct names to the two main heroines (Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra), which, in the history of film adaptations of this novel, is oddly a first . . . but come on! No adaptation in which the Count is the main character can rightly be called *Bram Stoker's Dracula*.
I also don't recall the scene in the book where Dracula appears in a red satin long-trained kimono. Between that attire, the white grease-paint on the face, and the ornate hairdo that includes a complicated braid topped off with what can only be described as a derrière-shaped basket on Gary Oldman's skull, this Dracula resembles nothing so much as an aging geisha. (Ill-advisedly, Coppola hired a Japanese costumer named Eiko Ishioka to handle the wardrobe. The story takes place in TRANSYLVANIA and ENGLAND, Francis!) Without belaboring the plot's particularities, let it be said that Coppola basically takes the easy way out and turns the thing into a Harlequin romance. "I've crossed oceans of time to find you," murmurs our Undead hero, as he gazes into the vacuity of Winona Ryder's eyes.
The movie DOES start out promisingly. We get some back-story on the vampire: Coppola and the film's writers go Stoker one step further and explicitly conflate the fictional Count with the Middle Ages ruler Vlad Tepes ("The Impaler"), who terrorized much of eastern Europe in the 15th century. (Strangely, Stoker had sort of dodged Dracula's "true" identity in the novel.) Coppola and cameraman Michael Ballhaus have great fun with the mise-en-scene for the prologue sequence: silhouetted soldiers, moving stiffly in a deliberately stylized way, spear one another in the foreground of a hellish red sunset. Later in the movie, Coppola will reference this bit again at a "cinematograph", in which the dark soldiers -- appearing on the screens presumably because Dracula happens to be there -- become like little marionettes ineptly trying to stab each other. The visual motif here is obviously an homage to a famous bit in Dreyer's *Vampyr*. Neat-o. But this sort of thing ends up being the main problem with the movie: much of the visual references are inside jokes appealing mainly to cinephiles (there is, for instance, a torch-holder on a wall in Drac's castle that is shaped like a human arm, a la Cocteau's *Beauty and the Beast*). Almost every scene ends in a silent-era style "iris dissolve". The lurid color-palette is an homage to the look of the old Hammer Studio horror films. All the heavy feminine panting and moaning would fit just as well in a Dario Argento movie. The true buff will also notice the photographic similarities to John Boorman's visually sublime *Exorcist II: The Heretic*, particularly during the climax when the heroes race against the sunset to catch up with Dracula. I mean, so on and so forth, for more than 2 hours. However, what the average horror fan -- or Dracula fan -- will get out of all this remains unclear.
In any case, Coppola isn't content with merely referencing film-work from the past; he feels he must OUTDO them, pointlessly laying on the undiluted fruit-punch blood (smite a stone cross with a sword in this movie, and the stone gushes blood), the hallucinogenic phantasmagoria, the overall hysteria. The movie is all spectacle -- no scares.
One can't finish a review of this movie without mentioning the acting. Gary Oldman is in Method Mode, over-earnestly delivering his tone-perfect Romanian accent. He sounds as if his mouth is full of marbles -- he is, for the most part, incomprehensible. Others here have mentioned the inadequacy of Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves -- wait till you hear Reeves say the phrase "If I may inquire . . .", or, even better, the place-name "Bukovina" (!) in a "British" accent. PRICELESS. The worst of the bunch, however, is Anthony Hopkins, but this is probably because the writers tried to make Van Helsing a funny character. Didn't work, guys.
3 stars out of 10, primarily for not being boring.