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| From http://thefilmexperience.net/storage/bram-stoker's-dracula-poster.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1396885037902 |
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola
After the ill-advised film by Dario Argento, I need to wash out the
bad taste. I needed something that showed how you really made a lurid yet artistically
brilliant adaptation. Francis Ford
Coppola, whatever you think of him, is always someone, even now, always
pushed his work to the best quality whatever it was. Yes, I realise he made Jack (1996), to a lesser extent The Rainmaker (1997), but I've yet to
get to them. Like Argento as well,
the kind of directors I'm drawn to have a tendency to be "difficult"
or at odds with commercial cinema though they're more than capable of making
more mainstream films, some of the best in fact, having a film like Argento's Dracula inexplicably appearing in their filmographies, usually for
work or the desire to make another film from it. Thankfully Coppola's take on the same Bram Stoker story is a lot more
interesting and impassioned. Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) goes to Transylvania to work for Count Dracula (Gary Oldman) only to find out soon after
he is a vampire, one who has interest in his fiancée Mina (Winona Ryder) and travels to England to cause terror to anyone in
his way. Coppola's take becomes far
more elaborate from them on in plot, treated with the attitude of a full
bloodied, erotic and madly heightened horror, and as a piece of high art
influenced and using the techniques of silent cinema, allowing Coppola to push filmmaking through the
material further.  |
| From http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BSDracula03.jpg |
My attitude to him, as a fan of
his, is blasphemous in that I found the first two Godfather films, while great filmmaking, to be the least
interesting films I've seen of his, or at least at this moment, needing to
rewatch them but drawn to everything else in his career instead. Coppola's apparent misfires are better
films than most directors' best work, and then you get to his masterpiece, The Conversation (1974), or a film that
is awe inspiring like Apocalypse Now
(1979) and you see that when he hits his best work, he succeeded immensely.
This is in mind that I appreciate his extravagance, work that does show an
egotism and a bullish personality behind it, but used for the best in that he
wanted to make films that were powerful to get the ordinary cinema going public
to feel something, including as entertainment. A human drive to create
incredible movies. His take on Dracula
is utterly spectacular, a fest of mostly practical effects and classic film grammar
techniques, as a result of budget restrictions but with his son Roman Coppola
as second unit director, using it to his advantage to show how much you could
create nightmarish imagery without needing to go to computers. Uses of
superimposition of images, additional actors playing character's shadows etc. adding
to the fantastique nature of the film. Of Dracula's eyes leering over the skies
as Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania,
men turning into a mass of rats or strange distortions of pace to show Dracula
stalking towards a victim from their garden. It's as baroque a take on the
vampire film as you can get, drenched with a grandeur that is drastically
different from either the 1922 or 1979 Nosferatu films. It's the style that was
probably in mind for Dario Argento's Dracula, but much more well made, from
the rich cinematography to the bold costumes and set designs by the late Ishioka Eiko, which is all captivating.
Here, the Italian American succeeds in where the Italian born director failed
years later in that this not only feels like a Hollywood film from the
nineties, the last hurrah in terms of weighty, old school filmmaking, but like
a seventies Italian genre film on a much higher budget. Very sexually explicit
not just in its scenes of actual nudity but in the mood of many scenes, and
references suggested from homoeroticism between the males, lesbianism, female
vampires taking a male victim sexually as much as for his blood, and a general
haze of the dark erotic that is out there for a blockbuster, and extremely
violent in a way that would never be mainstream American cinema in the current
decade for a licence like this, where a decapitation isn't a brief slosh of CGI
gore but messy and not comfortable for either the person acting it out or for
the viewer. It's as if Coppola is
actually as much inspired by Mario Bava's
Black Sunday (1960) as he is the
silent films, and considering his generation of American directors from the
seventies who got hooked on cinema and took inspiration from others to make
their own, I wouldn't be surprised the dense, atmospheric, set bound style of
that film and similar ones, more explicit in content, were in his mind making
this.
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| From http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/wp-content/uploads/ 2010/08/bram-stokers-dracula-21.jpg |
The film has had a divisive
history for people because of this. The first issue I'm going to tackle
instantly is the issue, as I had before, with Keanu Reeves. Actually he's not that bad, and he's does a good job,
listening to him, in trying to do an English accent and in his performance, but
the problem is that the accent, even if it is one that exists, is that it's a
stereotypical posh English voice that English people like myself openly mock
and sound theatrical to us, as would Oldman's
Romania voice would be for an actual Romania. As for his apparent stiffness,
considering the nature of all the Harker characters in the best films on Dracula - this one, F.W. Murnau's, Werner Herzog's - where they are actually weak people, and in this
case too held back, it doesn't matter if one can't help but imagine him saying
"Dude" or "Excellent!" at any time during the
narrative, because whatever the case his apparent stiffness works for this
intentionally artificial and crafted film. For the theatrical nature of the
film, the artificiality that is found in aspects like Reeve's accent, or the
hysterics of Anthony Hopkins as Van
Helsing, or the uber lurid content involving sexuality and gore, or the
dreamlike content such as gravity not existing when one attempts to descend the
outside walls of Dracula's castle, is opposite what most people think a horror
film should be, especially now, and the inherently bombastic and elaborate tone
Coppola takes to this style is
immensely different. Around a simple plot, you get a film, as in many of Coppola's work, that is carefully
constructed, many of them balancing cautiously between the absurd and the
powerful, as he did with Apocalypse Now,
with Rumble Fish (1983) or a Twixt (2011). What has become apparent
with viewing his Dracula again, is
that Coppola for all this bombast, his infamy making some of his films, and the
way that eventually took him and his company American Zoetrope down to the point he now occasionally makes a
film and mostly deals in wine making, he has a possibly naive, but rich
emotional core to his work that, for all the luridness of this film, is full of
a more thoughtful take on the Dracula character than most adaptations could be.
It's not a horror film as we usually see one has, with jump scares or throwing
gore directly at the viewers' faces, but a macabre, lucid take on the material
where the supernatural entities, even if they are evil undead, exist in a
profoundly more alive world where reality is more sensual and vivid then the
Victorian world that the mortal characters come from. Moments in the film are
legitimately creepy, but not through nasty imagery but that the violence is
painful or that the aesthetic and design of the film pulls from art and design
that is both unsettling and beautiful at the same time. The director infamous
for losing his mind during the filmmaking of Apocalypse Now is yet someone who, for all his broad gestures in
some of his films, is very subtle when he needs to be, especially when you
notice the moments in this film that are of most importance are treated with
less of the broadness of everything else.
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| From http://classic-horror.com/files/images/bramdrac-still.jpg |
The masterstroke that comes out
of the film from this viewing is that, for all the violence and death, it's not
a horror film, but a romance story between Mina and Dracula. Unlike Argento's Dracula which tries to cram in sympathy in a garbled way, only to
pull the rug out from under the viewers' feet immediately after, this film sets
this relationship up in the prologue, Mina a reincarnation of the bride of Dracula
when he was a mortal man, rejecting God after her death and becoming the
vampire. It becomes subversive both because the film, in its depiction of Mina,
or her more sexually open friend Lucy (Sadie
Frost), is far more open minded to them but because you can have Gary Oldman's Dracula, who feeds babies
to his vampire brides and kills those he drains the blood from, still as a
sympathetic character whose redemption through love is the finale for the
story. Daringly, it's suggested that while we cheer on the heroes - Helsing,
Jonathan Hawker, the three suitors of Lucy (Richard
E. Grant, Cary Elwes and Billy Campbell) - the tragedy is not the
damage Dracula has done, but Mina, who becomes a main character for the film
soon into it, is forced into a lifeless existence as a Victorian married women
once the end credits have finished. And its not a syrupy, badly included
romance either, but one that is fleshed out, is brought up from the beginning,
and in how its treated, is amazingly against the usual messages that are hidden
in these sorts of films about gender and sexuality.
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| From http://screenmusings.org/Dracula/images/bram-stokers-dracula-0456.jpg |
It's differences also means that the
film is different from many other horror films for how exaggerated it is. Where
you can have musician Tom Waits as
Renfield, not an important character in the plot, but with his accent,
mannerisms and almost pompadour hairstyle becomes instantly memorable, and in
scenes in this role against Richard E.
Grant and Winona Ryder as this is
normal, especially doing so with a plate of insects in his hand that he
daintily eats from. Where, while Gary
Oldman is giving the best performance in the film in an incredible take on
Dracula, he is still doing a Romanian accent as broad as Keanu Reeve's English one, partially dressed in a blood red kimono
with his hair in buns, or as a young, mesmerizingly beautiful man, with hippy
glasses and a giant top hat. Where the first moment of romance taking place
between Dracula and Mina takes place in a primitive picture house, Coppola taking time to tribute his
medium, where early porn is being shown in the background and a white wolf
suddenly causes havoc in the tents. Having seen a lot of his films and becoming
a fan of his, Coppola has films, even
acclaimed ones like Apocalypse Now,
that are split between the profundity and material that would come off as
ridiculous if seen in the wrong frame of mind as a viewer. This is a lot of
reason why his Dracula is derided as
much as it's acclaimed, but the cohesion between the sides, to the point that
the romance story in its centre, for its early nineties love song on the end
credits, and Ryder and Oldman staring lovingly in each others'
eyes in scenes where Dracula isn't a horrifying wolf man chowing down on
someone's neck, can be taken seriously yet is still depicted in the heightened,
extravagant tone of the horror content, is a success for the film.
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| From http://iztokgartner.blog.siol.net/files/2014/06/ 223956-bram_stokers_dracula_1992_zpsae8d933f.jpg |
Abstract Rating
(High/Medium/Low/None): None
Unfortunately I can't add the
film to the list, just off it because it's still pretty mainstream in
structure and tone despite everything that's different about this film, more so
now in comparison to current horror films. I'm probably going to kick myself
eventually for not doing so, but whatever the case it doesn't dampen the
virtues of it.
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| From http://www.moviepilot.de/files/images/0554/1357/Bram_Stoker_s_Dracula_2.jpg |
A Cinema of the Abstract movie?
In fact, while I would've three
years old when this film was first released, I had some tentative idea of it's
existence around that time, admittedly through a first person video game
tie-in, probably the least spectacular way one could learn of this film's
existence, but still some curiosity about it. The menacing and sinister
iconography from it, even in screenshots in a magazine showing a Doom clone, managed to have a power of
their own that fascinated me, which I was rewarded in having the experience of
when finally seeing the film itself. Thankfully from then on, as I became a massive
fan of Francis Ford Coppola films,
I've fallen in love with this one now, which goes as far as possible as a
gothic horror film as you can. One which is well made and well acted. It is a
technical feat still. It has grown
further rewatching it for this review as the character of Mina, when women are
usually potential victims in these sorts of horror films, and her relationship
with Dracula is the real narrative of the film, giving it a still-to-this-day
progressive tone without losing the full-on gore, sexuality and upfront baroque
tone that is also an experience. And the greater virtue is that, contrary to other
directors, including one whose own adaptation is why I needed to watch this one
to clear it from my mind through a better example, Coppola hasn't lost his skills as a filmmaker despite what some
people say. He's become more divisive, doesn't give damn, clearly, for commercial
worth of his newer films, instead doing what he wanted to do, and still utterly
rewarding for me to view, glad that he still has it.
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