Makes Tim Burton Look Like Aki Kaurismaki

Rating: 7/10 (25 January 2014)

Francis Ford Coppola's madly elaborate Dracula rendition is set between London at the advent of a modern-ish age and Transylvania according to an explosion at the Batman: The Animated Series factory. We meet a young attorney named Jonathan Harker who is supposed to venture to Dracula's castle to arrange some kind of real estate whatever stuff. The last guy who went there ran into some snags. No big deal, though. He goes, and there begins a series of deafening and flagrant omens, none of which seem to deter or even catch the attention of young Harker en route.
It seems as though every stop is being pulled out on Jonathan Harker's journey to let him know that danger is near. Many find the casting of Keanu Reeves in the role laughably wrong-headed, but if you think about it, he's the only one with a blank and vapid enough stare to be believable as someone who manages to miss the most aggressively blatant signs of suspicion.
Meanwhile, Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Professor Van Helsing as a guy who may not be able to save victims of wolf rape, but sure can explain the hell out of it. Now, there is a lot that transpires between the voyage to Salvador Dali's Looney Tunes night terror and the werewolf violation, but Coppola and his creative team show every brazen sign of being far more interested in parades of extravagance and ceremonious tableau than with narrative power. The movie is extraordinarily theatrical in how it favors intensification over flow.
The lavish use of expressionism reaches to such heights that it ends up eliciting unwanted laughter. Every set, every backdrop, every detail, foreshadowing, subtext, atmospheric flourish and mere shadow on the wall is screamed at us. It makes Tim Burton look like a Scandinavian minimalist. But all the same, it can be fun letting yourself get swept up in the energy and exhilaration of the whole go-for-broke enterprise.
It does, after all, salvage the title character from the creative flatness of most of his other movie interpretations, and then some. I'd argue that Werner Herzog's Nosferatu takes the cake as the more deeply affecting choice, but I mean, it didn't have wolf rape or baby-eating nymphomaniacs or Tom Waits as an insane guy. Or wolf rape. And Gary Oldman is here. And Sir Anthony Hopkins. They've never detracted from the quality of any movies either have been in as far as I can tell. But more to the point, as the movie sees it, there is a reason why the three Oscars it happened to win were for makeup, costume design and sound editing. It was also nominated for one more, and that was art direction. By now, you surely see the common thread: As a sensory experience, it's a gasser.