“You haven’t seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” my girlfriend gasped, stopping her laundry folding dead.
This caught my attention as it upset the established dynamic of our relationship. I am the one who interrupts every conversation with some version of “What? You’re telling me you’ve never seen [insert name of film no one has ever watched outside a film studies program]?!"
She then reflected on how gorgeous Coppola’s vampire opus is and chastised herself for not owning it. This again was a reversal of the natural order. I wake up with night sweats at the thought that there is a great movie somewhere I don’t own. She owns approximately seven DVD’s she acquired by accident in the early 00’s which she stores in a dusty case next to "Jagged Little Pill" and her old Microsoft startup discs.
I immediately turned off what I was watching and popped on the Coppola film...
I guess I thought I was safe skipping it all this time because I had absorbed all the famous flourishes like Dracula’s giant hair buns and his independently moving shadow through cultural osmosis and Simpsons Halloween episodes so I didn’t see the value in sitting through the whole movie. It’s not like Coppola covered himself in glory in the 90’s. His Dracula was sandwiched between Godfather III and Jack, a pair more cursed than any creature Bram Stoker ever dreamt up. (I do have a soft spot for The Rainmaker. Late 90’s Damon schlock is one of my favorite schlock vintages.)
So I was prepared for some good Oldman hamminess plus some visual extravagance. And maybe some scattered moments of unintentional camp?
What I got...I was not prepared for.
Coppola imagines the prologue battle as a glorious shadow play against a bloody red-orange sky which suggests Kurosawa’s Ran by way of Suspiria. The silhouette of Vlad the Impaler charges into frame and impales the holy bejesus out of the silhouette of some hapless soldier and I went “Oooooh.” Gorgeous stuff. It crossed my mind that I had stumbled upon an underappreciated masterpiece. Then he continued to impale that same guy and I stopped going “Ooh” and started worrying that Vlad was going to finish the battle with awfully low impaling stats if he gets this carried away with the first guy. Then Vlad lifted the guy off his feet with his spear and jiggled him in the air and I laughed out loud. What do you want him to do? Un-impale the guy? He has his reputation to think of.
When we cut to the carnage of the finished battle to reveal a sea of impaled soldiers stuck in the ground like bloodied beach umbrellas I applauded in my living room. The prologue gives a good taste of Coppola’s raging contempt toward restraint and coherence. It made me positively giddy and the rest of the movie did not disappoint.
The film is indeed the visual feast I expected, although visual orgy might be a more apt description. But it is more than just a showcase for stellar production design and jaw-dropping costumery. It is completely bugnuts and about fifty times hornier than I was expecting. I had heard the film was crazy but I thought that meant sloppy late-period auteur crazy. Not bouncing-off-the-walls-of-a-padded-cell-crazy. At one point two geysers of blood erupt into the frame from offscreen seemingly without cause. Even at its most hallucinogenic, The Shining at least had the courtesy to drop the blood off in an elevator.
Here is a film that features Tom Waits as gibbering, bug-eating Renfield lurching about in a loony bin that evokes nothing so much as an episode of Hoarders set in Terry Gilliam’s basement and it doesn’t stand out from the rest of the movie in the slightest.
If you can sit through this perverse phantasmagoria and your only reaction is “the accents are shaky”, well, you have my pity. Perhaps there is alternate dimension early 90’s Dracula where you don’t even consider the accents because the Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder’s parts are quite sensibly cast with Hugh Grant and Helena Bonham Carter, and everything is very grounded and logical, and Gary Oldman never explodes into a heap of rats that scurry out of a room like a scene from Ratatouille In Hell. Thankfully, we live in this dimension.
The film posits that around vampires the laws of physics warp and falter altogether. Shadows drop out of sync, blood drips upward, and rats crawl across the ceiling. Coppola takes this as his artistic baseline. The very celluloid on which the movie was shot feels warped by some twisted and unsavory evil. Scenes aren’t cut together in the traditional sense so much as they are swept up in a tempest of slavering fuck beasts and vampire concubines biting Keanu Reeves on the dick. You can just make out the structure of the Dracula novel in there through the operatic din. But it plays less like a traditional telling of the Dracula legend and more like someone watched all the versions of Dracula simultaneously while out of his mind on absinthe and then tried to transcribe the nightmares that ensued.
It is quite a lot of fun.
And yes Oldman, is quite the ham here. But when hamminess meets material that welcomes, nee, demands hamminess, the results can be glorious. The actor correctly intuits that when he is tasked with telling Ryder that he has crossed “oceans of time” to find her, subtle understatement is not the order of the day. And this is to say nothing of the need to be heard over Anthony Hopkins.
(By the way, no one ever told me Hopkins is HILARIOUS as Van Helsing. At one point Ryder asks if her best friend who had been turned into a vampire died in great pain, and Hopkins assures her that yes this was absolutely the case, adding by way of comfort “Then we cut off her head, and drove a stake through her heart, and burned it, and then she found peace.”)
I’m not sure I could argue with anyone who doesn’t like Bram Stoker's Dracula. It’s true I never got involved in the story exactly, enjoying the film more from the outside, as an observer to a bonkers spectacle. Yes, one could have made a better version of this movie, but that would mean we would lose this version of the movie and that would make me very sad indeed. I enjoyed every element of this film, but most of all I loved that there was a time when such a baroque, experimental swing from an auteur could exist as a popular mainstream hit.