REVIEW: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
The Phantom
A review by The Phantom
(s...@panix.com)
"Perhaps it was the Dristan," the Phantom thought to himself as he
left the theater. Surely the film itself -- a big-budget, prestige film
made by one of our most talented and respected filmmakers -- couldn't
have been as bad as it seemed. Worse than bad, really, for at times it
seemed downright incompetent, and if Coppola is anything at all, he's a
most able director who has worked successfully in several different
genres, from thriller to war film, crime drama to horror -- a man who in
fact is responsible for several of the best films of our time.
So yes, it had to be an unforeseen side-effect of the cold
medication the Phantom had taken with his $2 Coke just before the film
started. Perhaps its chemistry reacted badly with that of the "golden
topping" on the Phantom's $3 popcorn; perhaps the Phantom was still
suffering the after-effects of jet lag as his body struggled to cope
with the one hour time change between the Loews Astor Plaza in midtown
Manhattan and the suburbs of Chicago from which he had just arrived. It
had to be something.
Well, it *was* something: it was possibly the least competent
horror film and the biggest waste of time, money, and talent the Phantom
has witnessed in years. In fact, even putting aside its dubious merits
as a horror film, BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA frequently failed even to be
nothing more than competent, unremarkable filmmaking. It was, in short,
a terrible, horrific botch.
That the film is also one of the most successful of the fall season
can only be attributed to the ever more apparent Verhoeven-ization of
America. We are now, it seems, a nation of people who will watch nearly
anything at all as long as it is big-budget, Hollywood-style
entertainment featuring name-brand actors, buckets of blood, and just
enough naughty goings on to keep the prurient child in all of us up past
his bedtime. Coppola's DRACULA is without a doubt the most successful
translation of Paul Verhoeven's formula -- perfected in the blockbuster
film BASIC INSTINCT -- to another genre.
Sadly, with the possible exception of musical comedy, it is perhaps
the genre for which the BASIC INSTINCT treatment is least appropriate;
for while any mediocre thriller can be enlivened by the odd ice-pick
killing or kinky sex scene, a good horror film must be subtle above all
else. At first this may seem like a contradiction in terms -- after
all, if a horror film is to horrify us, mustn't it feature chainsaw
murders galore, buckets of blood, walking corpses, or some other equally
shocking special effects? The answer is no, at least not if the film
has pretensions to be anything other than drive-in fodder. The best
horror films do feature scenes of horror -- THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
would have seemed more like MY DINNER WITH ANDRE if Demme had left out
Hannibal Lector's jailbreak -- but those scenes are not what drives
them. In fact, while the audience may be momentarily shocked by such
scenes -- may even find them unforgettable, as many did the infamous
shower scene in PSYCHO -- the grueling atmosphere of tension and fear
that audiences feel while watching the best horror films is generated by
all that builds up to those scenes, not by the scenes themselves, which
serve as a form of psychological release from the preceding tension. If
a film is nothing but scene after scene of horror, it's really little
more than pornography: something that can be enjoyed only on the most
voyeuristic of levels. What disturbed audiences about the classic
horror film HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER was not so much the
scenes in which Henry kills someone -- there are enough of these scenes
in the film, true, but not really more than in any average horror film
-- but the scenes in which very little at all was going on. In
particular, the scene in which Henry describes the circumstances
surrounding his mother's death is one of the most gripping -- and
horrifying -- in the film, and it touched audiences in just the way the
scenes featuring Dr. Lector and Clarice Starling did in THE SILENCE OF
THE LAMBS. No buckets of blood; no writhing naked female vampires; no
ice-pick killings, but great horror nonetheless -- in fact, because of
it.
What we were promised when Coppola set out to bring yet another
version of Dracula to the screen was a return to Stoker's original text,
long and consistently ignored in screen adaptations of his work. The
sixty years since the classic (and now somewhat quaint) version
featuring Bela Lugosi's elegant Count have allowed filmmakers to make
more explicit what was only implied in Stoker's tale. That this is
hardly to anyone's benefit can be seen in Coppola's extended testimonial
to the efficacy of Karo syrup and Hollywood's special effects industry:
although the film is awash in blood, fancy costumes, miniatures, and
matte paintings from the moment the film begins to the moment it ends,
it's only after we leave the theater that we have time to wonder what
all the fuss was about. For all the vaunted authenticity and loving
attention to detail that $42 million can buy, it would seem that Coppola
overlooked some frequently neglected but important aspects of his craft:
the ability to tell a coherent story and present credible characters and
motivations for those characters to the audience, and then allow the
audience to use its own imagination to fill in the details.
The best horror films -- in fact, the best films of any kind --
leave more to the audience's imagination than we may at first realize:
consider the infamous chainsaw scene in De Palma's SCARFACE, which many
people find too graphic to watch, but which few people realize features
nothing more than quick cuts between a chainsaw, the victim, and blood
on a shower curtain. All the carnage is in their minds, where it
affects them so much more deeply than any amount of explicit on-screen
gore could. Even though film is primarily a visual medium, explicitness
is nearly always dispensable when good writing and acting are available;
it's only when they're not that we get to see Michael Douglas' naked
rear end. In the case of DRACULA, we get a two-hour definition of the
word "rococo" -- a word that until now the Phantom has reserved for use
as the ever-dependable answer to 14-across in the New York Times
crossword puzzle, but one which will from this moment on be inextricably
linked in his mind to images of over-decorated sound stages and young
female actresses who are alternately either over- or under-dressed
almost faster than the next bottle of Karo can be pressed into service.
Whether Stoker's original novel had the problems Coppola's film
adaptation has is beside the point -- after all, a film is not a novel
and many sacrifices must be made in order to compress a sprawling
narrative into a screenplay for a film with a running length of just
under two hours. The studio's publicity machine played up the
authenticity angle for all it was worth, and as a result many film
critics seem to have been bamboozled into believing that confusing,
poorly drawn characters, bad editing, and enough narrative for another
GODFATHER trilogy was a necessary price to pay so that we could finally,
for the first time in the history of the silver screen, enjoy on film
what Stoker originally was able to convey to us only on paper. A
triumph, then, of research and period accuracy! Amazing that Coppola
could achieve so much without the use of such non-authentic, modern
techniques as optical printing and other computer-aided special effects!
A visual feast of epic proportions!
Well, so was BASIC INSTINCT, and the Phantom heard precious little
from these same critics about the visual feast Verhoeven presented to us
in the form of Sharon Stone. While the Phantom has always been a phan
of Coppola's work (particularly his early work, including such
masterpieces of realism as THE CONVERSATION and THE GODFATHER), he
cannot for the life of him understand what happened between the time
Coppola read James V. Hart's screenplay and the time the last bucket of
blood was tossed in the camera's general direction.
In fact, it would be easier to discuss what *isn't* wrong with
DRACULA than to review what is. For all its faults, Coppola's film has
a lush, rich look that is very effective in setting the tone of the
film, dominated though it is by a heavy reliance on interiors, matte
paintings, and miniatures. And in taking a page from Sam Raimi's book,
Coppola doesn't overlook any special effect or camera trick that would
have been possible before the introduction of computers into mainstream
filmmaking (so there is, thankfully, no T2-style morphing in the film).
Thus he gives us many strange points of view and unexpected movements of
the camera; several sequences in EVIL DEAD-vision (played as a homage to
the very few special effects in the 1922 silent classic NOSFERATU); and
many subtle and playful tricks for the eye, from shadows that don't, to
the Count himself, who doesn't always turn up where our rational senses
demand he should.
But it's what he doesn't give us that makes the film so
disappointing. Putting aside the screenplay (which is packed full of
enough exposition for three DRACULA films), Coppola's tendency to jump
us quickly from one scene to the next, then back again, then somewhere
else entirely; the dim lighting; the decision to shoot the entire film
inside a sound stage, giving the production a very claustrophobic feel;
and the miscasting of the film's principals all lead inexorably to the
very confusing and muddled result. The film as structured is completely
dependent on the eventual emotional connection between Ryder and Oldman,
but for whatever reason this never happens -- and in any event, their
eventual meeting comes much too late in the proceedings to make much
difference at that point. If the point of this version of the Dracula
legend is to play up the "Love Never Dies" aspect of the story --
certainly a promising new take on a shopworn old tale -- why is the
climactic meeting so delayed? Coppola's answer seems to be that he
needed time to give us three or four other climaxes first, and while
each vignette plays out satisfactorily, we are hurled from one to the
next so quickly and abruptly that we lose any sense of continuity; by
the time the film has reached its final "climax" we can barely keep up
with the plot, let alone any of the characters who are tossed in for the
film's denouement. Did we really need Van Helsing *and* Renfield *and*
not one; not two; but three of Lucy's suitors? Is Jonathan Harker
(Keanu Reeves) important at all? If not, why does he dominate the first
half of the film? If so, why is he literally abandoned halfway through?
Coppola doesn't seem to know; worse, he doesn't seem to care. And by
the end of the film, neither do we.
It may be that Coppola started down this road with good intentions;
after all, it's hard to believe that such a mess could have been made
intentionally. Ironically, by sparing no expense in attempting to
create an up-to-date version of the Dracula tale by returning to the
original narrative, Coppola accomplished much less than Roger Corman
might have 30 years ago for over $40 million less. His adaptations of
Edgar Allen Poe's short stories -- including the excellent THE HOUSE OF
USHER, THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, and THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH -- are
as full of costumes and over-the-top acting as Coppola's big- budget
kitschfest; but where Coppola lost himself in the techniques of horror
filmmaking like a kid in a -- very expensive -- candy store, Corman
always knew what was most important and what safely could be offered up
as a sacrifice to the gods of low-budget filmmaking. Expensive special
effects were never an option for Corman, but sound screenplays and good
performances were, and he never willingly stinted on those. As a
result, Corman's Poe adaptations are as beautiful, as watchable, and as
effective today as they were almost three decades ago. And whereas
these films remain among the very best of his work, Coppola's
kitchen-sink adaptation of Stoker's tale will likely be forgotten six
months after its inevitable video release.
In fact, it's already seeming a little hazy to the Phantom, though
then again, that could have more to do with the Dristan than the film
itself. Perhaps the Phantom's best advice to his phans would be to
avoid operating heavy machinery after watching DRACULA, and to
discontinue use and sneak into ALADDIN in the theater next door if
disorientation sets in. DRACULA is this season's most expensive
prescription for disappointment, and the Phantom can only hope that its
success does not lead to a wave of similarly sloppy and ineffective
"horror" films in the months and years to come.
: The Phantom
: s...@panix.com
: cmcl2!panix!sbb
Ronald Hogan
A ten-step film review by Ronald Hogan
Copyright 1992 Ronald Hogan
1) The film's overture is set in the Middle Ages, during the Crusades.
Note that the setting is Eastern Europe, the porous region where the
East and West intermingle, where Europe gets its tastes of Eastern
exoticism, such as the Turks. Dracula exists in this turbulent
middle ground and is profoundly changed by it. It's not just God that he
rejects, but Western civilization. He gives himself up entirely to the
mysterious Other that the East often represents.
2) Much has been made about the degree to which this film is faithful
to Bram Stoker's novel. Of course, the very heart of the text is
completely reversed, but in superficial form, the film does come closer
to the novel than any previous adaptation I can recall. The multiple
points of view and forms of text are recreated in an effective, if
slightly disjunctive, style. By the way, isn't it an interesting point
that the two major novels which lay the foundations for the horror genre
(the other being Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) are both epistolary and
from multiple points of view, and focus on the issue of knowledge of the
nature and identity of the Monster and ways to control it?
3) I'd like to suggest that part of an explanation is that Frankenstein
comes out of the birth of English Romanticism, which leads by the end of
the century to Modernism, which is where I propose to situate Dracula.
This historical position is expressed in DRACULA through the
highlighting of the emerging technology: typewriters, phonographic
recorders, the cinematograph. Also the tentative steps towards
psychology. Another modernist touch is the emphasis on the text--not
only the diaries, but the maps, especially that map that hangs in
Dracula's castle, and the ancient manuscripts. Look at the way that
these documents interface with the events of the film. DRACULA has a
lot more in common with, say, PROSPERO'S BOOKS than most people would
notice. It doesn't have as high a level of information density, and
it's more accessible, but the connection is there.
4) It came up in conversation that this film, more than just about any
other in the last year or so, is screaming for an analysis through the
philosophy of Michel Foucault. I'm not prepared to do such a reading of
DRACULA at this time, but I will suggest that the following books would
lead towards interesting elaborations: MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION, THE
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH, and THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF
KNOWLEDGE. This could probably give anybody enough of a start. Maybe
I'll get around to it someday in the future (yeah, right).
5) Well, I can at least mention sexuality. It's a cliche that vampires
represent sexual desires, so I'll steer away from that and simply say
that the control of sexuality implied by the control of vampires is
evident in two particular scenes. Van Helsing's lecture shows sexuality
as a subject of scientific investigation, a subject which can be
identified and regulated. The illustrations in the Burton edition of
the Arabian Nights are another way in which sex becomes a classifiable
object; i.e. these are the different types of sexual intercourse,
identified and categorized. Keep in mind that Burton's interest was
more thn prurient--it was 'anthropological', to use a slightly
anachronistic term.
6) Back to the vampire: Gary Oldman was excellent in this role. I
have to admit, though, that having recently rewatched JFK for a class
paper, I was seeing Oldman as Oswald more often than as Dracula. It's
not entirely farfetched--Oldman, especially in his biographical roles
(Sid Vicious, Joe Orton, Lee Oswald, and arguably Dracula), portrays the
alienated outsider, the man cut off from and rebelling against his
culture, very well. Dracula's destructive rage is much sleeker than
Oldman's other roles, but it ultimately draws from the same energies.
7) Dracula is also the most recent member of a lineage of Coppola's
tragic protagonists, tainted and condemned by their struggles against
the dominant culture. Michael Corleone's an obvious example, and one
that also reunited with God at the end. Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW is
another potential; he also rejected civilization and retreated into pure
animalist, instinctual action and lust. You could even make an argument
for Tucker, who is hunted down and destroyed by the auto industry and
the government (read: the vampire hunters) because of the threat to
their dominance over culture that he represents.
8) While I'm drawing parallels between Coppola films, here's one: the
wedding of Jonathan and Mina and the scenes intercut with it (which I
don't identify so as not to be a complete spoiler) and the baptism of
Michael Corleone's son in THE GODFATHER.
9) Cinema is quite possibly the modernist medium. A movement that was
emphasizing mastery over the world through identification and awareness,
the act of seeing with one's own eyes, out of which emerges a medium
that (until sound was added) relied entirely on the visual. According
to many early film theorists (especially Siegfried Kracauer, later Andre
Bazin, see also Bela Belasz), film's greatest power was its ability to
stand in for reality, to offer reality to the audience as a controlled
subject, but controlled in such a way that its inherent reality was not
violated. As cinema grew, a language of cinematic forms emerged:
dissolves, silhouettes, etc., forms which reinforced a linear, rational,
narrative structure to film and to reality. DRACULA reproduces much of
the early language of cinema, a language that has for the most part been
replaced by the rapid fire blitz of images for which we can thank
television, the post-modernist medium. DRACULA is a deliberate
throwback to what cinema was, which is undoubtedly why so many critics
think the film is overblown. (Well, it is in spots--but then, DRACULA
isn't an old film--it's the 1990s recreation of what Coppola thinks old
film were like)
10) Dracula rejected God and civilization. Nobody specifically refers
to him as the Antichrist, at least not that I recall, but he's clearly
meant to fulfill that role. And his final words with Mina, lifted from
an obvious source (again not revealed to prevent too much of a spoiler)
bring that point home. Dracula's death (I don't really think of this as
a spoiler; I think we all know he dies) is not a defeat, in the same way
that the guilty verdict against Tucker was not a defeat, or that
Patton's death isn't a defeat (Okay, Coppola didn't direct PATTON, but
he co-wrote it). I think of the end of DRACULA in much the same way
that I think of the end of Coppola's RUMBLE FISH and THE OUTSIDERS--the
king is dead, long live the king. The cycle begun in the overture is
brought to the appropriate end.
follow-ups and email welcome
Ron Hogan
rho...@usc.edu