Day Four: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
I love that the director of a few of the greatest American movies ever made, particularly the first two Godfathers and The Conversation, would, a decade and a half later, still have the inner fervor to make something as intense, enraptured, poignant and just plain masturbatory as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Granted, Coppola, with many of his 1980s projects, had been down the intense and masturbatory road before, but most of those are little more than film school curiosities. Bram Stoker’s Dracula doesn’t feel like a test tube movie though, its felt, it means it, and its my favorite version of the novel.
The film was also my introduction to Gary Oldman. I was twelve when Dracula was released, and I had never seen anything as committed and deliriously oddball as Gary Oldman as Count Dracula. I had seen the Browning/Lugosi picture (which I find overrated, both men have done better), and I had seen the Palance film by this point, but Oldman was an entirely different thing altogether. I was used to my monster movies being a little more square, and now I’m watching a brilliant fusion of DeNiro method and presentational 1920s silent act to the rafters and back acting. Oldman, like the movie in general, was overwhelming.
The entire film was, and still is, overwhelming. I’ve already found that certain words, phrase, or thoughts have begun to dominate why I’m choosing certain movies for this series, and why I respond to certain horror films. “Means it”. “No apologies”, and so forth. I can deal with some bad acting, or low budget, or maybe ideas that should have been left on the cutting room floor. But I, in this genre, can’t deal with self-consciousness, with hedging your bets, with playing to the cheap seats. Horror should be about what we’re afraid of, but also what we’re afraid to admit we think about it, what we like, what turns us on, what we’re most afraid we’ll lose, etc. There’s no room, at least in the Greats, for parlor room tricks. I don’t give a shit about that stuff usually, life is too short.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula does play a lot of parlor tricks and it isn’t one of the Greats. Some of Coppola’s casting stunts don’t pay off (Cary Elwes, Keanu Reeves), and some of the scenes are overbaked even for this (a moment of temptation for Anthony Hopkins’ Van Helsing comes to mind.) The film has this unshakable, amazing lunatic intensity though, and Coppola’s experimentation with silent movie, in camera technique should make this required viewing for even the snobs who don’t buy into its purplish love story.
The love story works. Not drowning under all of Coppola’s ideas would be impressive enough, but Oldman, despite being a vicious, inhuman killer (his immorality is not shortchanged in a bid for sympathy either) elicits our sympathy anyway. Dracula’s romantic hunger and more base, animal instincts compliment, electrify one another, and Ryder contrasts, underplays into herself into the relationship beautifully. The building of the relationship here, subtracting the more obviously out of place plot points, would be acceptable in a more straight romance.
My favorite scene of the film is a perfect crystallization of every florid element I love: the costumes, the ripe music, the two actors going for it, the blunt passion. The self-loathing. It all comes together when Mina finally gives herself to Dracula, and his fangs slide out and he rasps (like an orgasm): “I can’t, I love you too much!” She begs and he finally sinks his fangs into her, and for a moment the bad guy who’s really become the good guy surrogate for the audience wins.
Besides Oldman and Ryder, who truly are the movie; Tom Waits and Sadie Frost also contribute memorable charaterizations. I like Tom Waits’ music, but I really like Tom Waits in films, particularly as himself in Cigarettes and Coffee and paired with Lily Tomlin in Short Cuts. He’s Renfield here, and his working man hipster dementia builds the foreboding of Dracula’s pursuit wonderfully.
Sadie Frost is Lucy, and she’s the most purely erotic object in an already overheated movie. She also, like Christopher Stone, is privy to the joys of werewolf nooky. Not sure if that counted as bestality in Old Time Britain, but I imagine Stone would have had some legal problems.
I love this big tangled erotic creepy mess of a clusterfuck of a movie, but, there’s a very simple image that always comes to mind as I ponder Bram Stoker’s Dracula: of Prince Vlad, watching Mina window shop. They don’t get along at first, and after a curt exchange, he says “I shall bother you no more.” And he disappears. I’ve followed Oldman’s career, like any movie lover, pretty intently since then, but he’s never had a line delivery that has haunted me quite as much.
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