Francis Ford Coppola's `Dracula' - Bram Stoker is not to blame

Rating: 3/10 (28 October 1999)

There's no particular reason why a film should be faithful to its source; indeed, the best screen version of `Dracula', the John Badham version of 1979, is not based directly on the novel at all, but on the Edwardian stage play. And a good thing too. `Dracula', the novel, consists entirely of primary documents - diary entries, letters, newspaper reports, and the like - arranged in chronological sequence. This kind of novel REQUIRES surgery when a script is being written. But Coppola, possibly with an eye to his place in the history books, includes scenes, like the introductory ones in Dracula's castle, that only work in literary form.
Apart from including a handful of previously unfilmed scenes - for no very good reason - Coppola's film is remarkably unfaithful to the book. Yes, this is no sin in itself. But if Coppola is so foolish as to call his film `Bram Stoker's Dracula' he can hardly complain when critics say, `Well, no, it isn't.' What riles me is that every change is not only for the worse, but also completely witless. There are scenes of warfare in the Middle Ages, adding a plot element so utterly at odds with the central story, and so completely out of nowhere, as to render the film ridiculous in the first few seconds.
Indeed, Coppola has gone out of his way to make his film ridiculous. (And yet somehow he seems to take it all so seriously.) The sometimes-praised LOOK of the film is absurd: not natural, not nineteenth-century, not attractive, not anything. Dracula has a blob-black shadow that moves with a life of its own. Why? It doesn't even yield striking images. Transylvania is bathed in a ruby-red light that is otherwise only seen in Italian Hercules films. There are pointless visual references to the fact that the story takes place during the first years of motion picture technology. Why, yes: the story is also set around same time as the Boer War, but so what?
And the acting - oh, the acting. Anthony Hopkins and Keanu Reeves bellow at each other in unidentified accents as if vying with each other to see who can make the biggest fool of herself. Winona Rider is cast adrift by the script, but I admit she does what she can. All of Gary Oldman's talent is devoted to transmitting at least SOME sense of character from beneath his ludicrous make-up and Princess Leia hair-do. This film is not some minor mishap. It is a major disaster: an enormous bellyflop that drenches us all in stupidity.