Coppola's "Dracula"

ROMEO VOID — BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
URB Magazine, Los Angeles, 1992

"Bram Stoker’s Dracula" is a fever dream; a rapturous, incantatory phantasmagoria; a ravishing Liebestraum in which the im¬ages, not the narrative, form the story’s emotional core. Like Wagner in his operas, and Von Sternberg in his films, Francis Ford Coppola has held back nothing in his attempt to inundate us with a riotous profusion of sensual and decaying splendors. In the process, he has succeeded in making his Dracula a figure who is paradoxically transformed by his grotesqueness into something very nearly noble. This is the film for all those who are fed up with the cloying cuteness of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It is not a great film, in the conventional sense, being flawed by weak narrative links, poor, or off-key performances, and a recurrent sense of detachment and remoteness. But it is also more than merely great: a film that literally mesmerizes us with its gothic symbolism, tapping directly into the dark arteries of the unconscious until we swoon in its narcotic flood, a river of opiate delirium.

As Dracula, the remarkably protean Gary Oldman is Romeo in the void, a quester for a profane Grail, Tristan not just mad, but crucified by a 400-year old love. Stoker’s original novel can be read, in one way, as a Celtic reaction to the Victorian whitewashing of eros Tennyson drowned the medieval romance of King Arthur with (and “Dracula” is nothing, if not a medieval romance), coating over its primal bloodshed and sexuality. The terror of feminine sexuality, specifically, is at the heart of Dracula. As the awakener of women’s dormant libidos, initiating them into a power that men, because they do not understand it, fear and must repress, Dracula is paganism’s revenge on the sterility of Christianity — his blood ritual but a mirror, as Coppola and his writer, Jim Hart, make clear, for the symbolic cannibalism of the Holy Mass. But Dracula worships in the Church of Love, elevating carnal, mortal love to the level of a sacrament. As such, he is the ultimate paramour, the final exemplar of Romanticism’s revolt from a tyrannical, deiocentric universe.

By endowing Dracula with a too sympa¬thetic mystique, though, the filmmakers have set the film’s dramatic center spin¬ning. Anthony Hopkins, wretchedly ham¬ming it up as the redoubtable Van Helsing, carries no moral authority whatsoever. When he proclaims to Jonathan Harker (the wooden Keanu Reeves), as they seek out Dracula’s destruction, that “now we are God’s madmen,” you feel the joke is on him. The true and only divine madman here is Dracula himself. Unable to balance the story’s opposing tensions any other way, the role of redeemer is given over to Winona Ryder’s fey, but strainingly ardent Mina, who, as the reincarnation of the Count’s bride, seals their lover’s pact in the end with an improbably, sentimental flourish. (The film also skirts Stoker’s hysteria about immigration that is the novel’s subtext).

The production design and costumes, by Thomas Sanders and Eiko Ishioka, embody the dreamworld of the Victorian imagination with a Byzantine refulgence, a Pre-Raphaelite sensuousness that is glorious. Drenched with images from the Gothic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Dracula is a crepuscular ode, a vision of the twilight of Empire, aswirl with smoke and hot¬house flowers, the morbidity and fire of a dying civilization. But as deeply as we may be enthralled by the lushness of his world, Coppola never succeeds in drawing us fully into it. We remain at a distance, like the director himself, outside looking in, emotionally unengaged.

This is also a movie about a disease transmitted through the blood. Dracula’s decision, at the culmination of his quest for Mina, to spare her from the purgatory of the un-dead, seems to reflect the filmmaker’s conscious, if subtle, awareness of AIDS. This unexpected reversal causes the storyline to wobble (again), but what the film loses in logic, Dracula himself gains in pathos and hu¬manity. In the end, Dracula, embracing only extremes, simultaneously seduces and repels. Full of erotic images that are exces¬sive, disturbing, grandiose and beguiling, it is dream and nightmare, opera and parody, sublimity and absurdity, love and madness.