Sunday night I watched Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula again, one of my all-time favorite movies. I say this not because it's a great movie, because it certainly isn't, but because it has great stuff in it, and, more importantly, because it was a honest attempt by some very talented people to try to bring Stoker's original story to he screen.
The version I watched is the fourth I have owned. After owning a video, a laserdisc (I have never even owned a player) and a DVD, I bought the Superbit version a couple of years ago, It's hard to say whether the quality is actually any better - my screen is so white that I don't have much shadow detail in any event, but the quality appeared to be quite good in the brighter scenes.Just watched this movie - one of my favorites - again Saturday and Sunday nights. The version I watched is the fourth I have owned. After owning a video, a laserdisc (I have never even owned a player) and a DVD, I bought the Superbit version a couple of years ago, It's hard to say whether the quality is actually any better - my screen is so white that I don't have much shadow detail in any event, but the quality appeared to be quite good in the brighter scenes.
What I like about this movie is that, first, they tried to tell the original story, and second, that the movie is told using such gorgeous visuals and sounds. The sound effects are a big part of the movie, and the music for the love theme is one of my favorite. I love just watching the scenes where trains puff across the top of the screen, throwing shadows on pages of a letter or journal on the bottom of the screen.
What I don't like I feel just as strongly about. The filmmaking is so self-indulgent that there are many scenes that are unnecessary to the movie, and actually counterproductive, i.e. I remember people laughing at the scenes when I saw it. What I refer to primarily here are the some of the sex scenes. I'm no prude, but they just kill the mvie because they stop the story dead in its tracks. Examples are Mina and Lucy laughing over illustrations of sex in Richard Burton's Arabian Nights, and the topless vampiresses attacking Jonathan Harker. I don't mind the sex betwen Dracula and Lucy because his relationship to her could plausibly be sexual - it makes sense there, or even Jonathan being attacking more explicitly by the three women, it's the nudity and explicit content that bothers me because it is unnecessary and actually a distraction to the movie. There's just no drama to a topless woman popping up out of a bed to attack Jonathan. Not that it's a bad thing - I just think it hurt the movie, and was very unnecessary. Gauzy dresses that showed essentially the same thing would have been better. And the whole Richard Burton reference was unnecessary - it was an example of Coppola picking up things that were correct for the time (like absinthe) and adding them to the movie. When I watch the movie now, I do my best to mentally edit all of those scenes out. Lucy's pre-Dracula sexual obsession doesn't add a cent to the story, and are actually counterproductive to the story. They're simply indulgent filmmaking.
My principal problem with the script (although I don't think it hurts the movie - I just dislike the story) is the love interest between Mina and Dracula. That she is attracted to Dracula in the book, I think, is due to his powers - it isn't a love interest, and I think it weakens the story. Dracula becomes a love interest, and not a monster.
The music also has its bad points - while the love theme is beautiful, and the entire score is suitably atmospheric, there are points, most excruciatingly on the title credit, where it blasts away and, again, kills the movie's momentum while you wonder what the hell is up with the music.
Finally, any analysis of the movie has to take on Gary Oldman's Dracula. Basically, I think Oldman is terrific whenever he's in makeup, but when he becomes the young slacker vampire he's just not effectively threatening - again, the decision to require the monster to have a love interest requires him to destroy the really frightening character he develops at Castle Dracula. I also think that the butt-had hairdo he gets at the Castle is another example of indulgent filmmaking, and he'd have been far better with straight, lanky white hair, per the book and his later appearance. I loved the animal Dracula, the bat Dracula, and the wolf Dracula was okay as well. I don't think the sexual relationship with a senseless Lucy in the garden was strictly necessary, but it was a graphic representation of how he was using her, and far closer to what I think his relationship to Mina should have been. Sheer power over a incapacitated victim. Because that's really what he was doing - it was an expanded form of rape, not a mutual attraction. To the extent sex served as a convenient illustration of what was going on, I think it was a good decision. But the idea that the women he attacked were willing victims, and therefore that there was some love interest is alien to the story, to me. Obviously Hollywood disagrees. But I think you have to decide whether you want a horror story or a love story. I don't think Dracula should be both.
Let's see, what else? The costumes were over the top to me - they were gorgeous, but they were also distracting and illogical. Dracula's fancy robes didn't make sense, nor did his suits in London. Lucy's wedding dress as well - it was a charming idea to model a dress after a frill-necked lizard, but it was obvious when you saw it that that's what they'd done. The book on the making of the movie said that one initial idea was to play the whole movie against a black stage with gorgeous costumes for visual interest. I think the costumes should have been scaled back when the movie was made more "normal."
Oh, one other thing. The identifying of Dracula with Christ at the end of the movie were about as subtle as a brick - the quotations from Christ on the cross, and the final eyes-up to resemble the classical Christ were just indulgent filmmaking, and I think the result of trying to humanize the monster. Dracula goes from a monster to a love interest to a misunderstood soul to Christ. Sorry - I just don't buy it. I think you illustrate that he is a tortured soul, and that his death was a relief to him as well, as Stoker indicated, but there's no logical basis for analogizing him to Christ. Again, it's a cutesy idea that just distracts you from the movie. And nothing, but nothing, can distract you from Gary Oldman's double chin in the death scene. Again, he does astonishingly well in old-age makeup. Without it, Mr. "soul patch" Dracula just doesn't work for me.
, which has the now-ominous notation that it is the "final video release of Star Wars in its original version" so I can go back and see the original versions whenever I like. Of course it's not likely I'll ever watch the muddy VHS versions, but they're there for historical purposes. At least for another ten years or so until the videotape degrades. After that I'll have to rely on my memory of what the original movie looked like, I guess.