A Stylish Rendition of a Familiar Tale.

Rating: 5/10 (15 October 2009)

It's like an Italian prose opera in seventeen acts, full of directorial flourishes, special effects, and epic displays of elaborate wardrobe and intricate sets.
Basically, it's the plot we're already familiar with from Bela Lugosi's first sound movie through various sequels and parodies. Renfield is a madman who eats flies. Harker goes to Castle Dracula to clinch a real estate deal with you-know-who, is semi-seduced by the brides, and imprisoned for a long time. Dracula takes a ship to London and moves into Carfax Abby. He sucks the blood of the frivolous Lucy and then turns his attention to the virginal Mina, fiancée of Harker, who has escaped from the Borga Pass and then Helsinki, I mean van Helsing, is called in on a consult and there is garlic and mirrors that crack and a cross that Himself finds disgusting and a narrow escape and the avoidance of daylight and smashed coffins in the castle basement and --
What dazzling imagery! Coppola's camera first hides Harker's and Mina's kiss behind the tail of a peacock. The eye on one of the feathers becomes an iris that dilates and reveals a dreadful castle half hidden in roiling gray clouds that shade into a murky vermilion. It's a feast for the eyes. Gary Oldman's hair do alone is worth a look -- two revolting wedge-shaped buns of gray extending from his head at oblique angles. Not that either the costumes, the set dressing, or the production design in general strive for authenticity. It doesn't look like London or Rumania in 1895. It looks like a nightmare after a mushroom omelet, in which settings resembling a ghoul-haunted London and Rumania in 1895 manage, after a struggle, to put in an appearance.
Winona Ryder is winsome with her too-tight bodice and long sleeves and those frightened calf-like eyes. Keanu Reeves is lightweight as Harker. Sir Anthony Hopkins' presence in the last half of the movie is encouraging because we all know it adumbrates the undoing of that bloodless freak and, thus, the end of the movie.
All this effort has gone into a story that isn't really very interesting nor even, in its specifics, very original. I didn't care much who lived or died though I hoped for a happy outcome. The lighting is striking. Not one scene in broad daylight -- not that one would expect poplar leaves fluttering under a blazing autumn sun. Everything is murky and dark, as it is in all movies about the Undead. The creeping, luminous green mist was equally well done in "Something Wicked This Way Comes." The smoky shadows lurching around in the carnation light were from the Frank Langella version of the myth. The scene in which van Helsing holds the cross over the spasmodic body of Lucy, chanting "the power of Christ compels you!", during which she vomits in his face, is immediately recognizable.
Dull and overwrought.
Unless, unless -- was it all meant to be a JOKE? Are we supposed to laugh when the Count tells Harker, "I never drink . . . wine." How about when Harker is first met at the Borga Pass by the black coach and the coachman is wearing the head of an enormous hawk? Or how about when one of Dracula's maids seems about to fellate Harker, opens her mouth to hiss at him, and reveals the incisors and canines of a saber-toothed tiger? Shouldn't any ONE of those things give Harker reason for pause?