Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ Is a Staggering, Horny, Delirious Achievement

Not many directors in the history of the medium have been able to tell intimate, character-based stories against epic backdrops that actually feel epic, rather than merely bloated and expensive. I have a sense that for all that Francis Ford Coppola is justifiably and enthusiastically-lauded for a run of films including The Rain People (1969), The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979), that he is still somehow underestimated. When the dust settles, I wonder if Coppola won’t be remembered as the best director this country has ever produced. He’s certainly the most idiosyncratic of the “movie brats” of the 1970s: the only one of them who kept his promise to one day return to smaller, independent filmmaking; and the creative force behind a huge Hollywood musical (One From the Heart), a couple of Nicolas Ray-inflected adaptations of S.E. Hinton YA melodramas (The Outsiders and Rumble Fish), a time-travel mid-life rom-com that has aged particularly well (Peggy Sue Got Married), a stealth-superhero film Youth Without Youth, a truly independent and intimate noir called Tetro and a tiny vampire flick with Twixt that functions as a threnody for the death of his son Gian-Carlo in 1986. He is a rare combination of consummate craftsman and inveterate fabulist. He is a scholar who appreciates the history of his medium, and also an artist in the truest sense of being able to express what seems inexpressible.

He is more involved in the dreamlife than it might seem at first — even his consensus worst, the peculiar Jack, has about it a surrealism that paints its suburban setting as a place that’s shot through with nostalgia but also with what I would say is a healthy dose of strangeness. Consider the opening has a woman dressed as a witch at an elaborate masquerade party go into labor prematurely — and then Coppola offering a point-of-view shot of the baby being born at the hospital. Jarring, though it’s the appropriate amount of uncanniness for a film about a child stricken by a disorder that ages him at ten times the normal rate. Jack makes sense, too, as further clarification of Coppola’s fascination with youth; with the process of the loss of innocence not for just children, but for lawyers becoming mob bosses, or even hardened special forces assassins learning that there are horrors beyond even their imagining. It’s that almost naive quality in even his “tough” movies that is the key to the sometimes-surprising humanism of Coppola’s work. And it’s that quality of empathy informing not just the substance of, but the technical elements he brought to the creation of his extraordinary 1992 masterpiece, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which, as of this writing, is streaming on The Criterion Channel). He wanted to highlight the primal emotions driving the piece, and he wanted to do it with the oldest tricks of the film trade. It didn’t hurt that as a teen camp counselor, Coppola would read Bram Stoker’s novel to his charges as a creepy, gothic bedtime story.

He came to the project while working on The Godfather Part III when Winona Ryder gave him James V. Hart’s script, in what she saw as an attempt to make peace after her late withdrawal from that project. She knew Coppola would recognize the story as a ravishing, consumptive love story: a passion play in the literal sense where every emotion is elevated and every gesture is directed at the rafters. A chronicler of monsters, Coppola would see in this how love can curdle into obsession, and how obsession could make a monster of a holy soldier who had devoted his life to God; or of a young Victorian lady whose budding sexuality is already seen by her culture as an unholy affliction. Love is a sickness, unpredictable and contagious, addicting and sometimes mortal. Vampirism is a sexually-transmitted disease that is occasionally contracted willingly. For Coppola, the piece is the culmination of a career spent in thrall to his passions. And because he’s never met a challenge he didn’t make harder, he thought that as Stoker’s novel was written in 1897 — essentially the dawn of motion pictures — he enlisted his son Roman to help create a plan to use classic motion picture techniques in the telling of the tale. It makes sense not so much in a rational way, but in a sensual way. The poet William Blake used acid to etch each plate used to press copies of his poems, believing that the touch of the creator’s hand gave ineffable energy to the creation. He called it the “infernal method.” It’s why stop-motion can just feel different; maybe it’s the imperfections, the jitters and the flicker, that are proof of life. Maybe it’s in how we are flawed by our nature and then humbled and not completely destroyed by our tragedies that makes us human.

A magician’s bag of tricks were employed: miniatures; matte paintings; front and rear projection; forced perspective; and double, triple, even quadruple exposures in which film would be refrigerated sometimes for weeks between being run through the camera with different portions unmasked. Columbia gave Coppola $40 million to do it his way. So he made a meticulous storyboard that he converted into a crude animation complete with imagist paintings and scenes from Jean Cocteau’s hallucinogenic Beauty and the Beast, brought on an extraordinary team of crafts people (including future Oscar-winner Peter Ramsey), and hired the incomparable Eiko Ishioka to design the picture’s distinctive, unforgettable costumes. The result is a film that doesn’t feel possible. It’s shot on soundstages which enhance the artificiality of the piece of course, but it’s more than that: it’s a movie shot with “dead” technologies in a flat aspect ratio (1.85:1) that was introduced in 1953 which, for the movie nerd, is a little like discovering a new novel by Ernest Hemingway. It’s a miracle.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula opens with images of a grand dome, a voiceover narration locating the time and place as 1462 upon the fall of Constantinople, leaving the stemming of non-Christian invaders to a “Romanian knight of the Sacred Order of the Dragon known as Dracula” in Transylvania. The first look at Dracula (Gary Oldman) finds him preparing for battle. He’s handed his helmet which is, as designed by Ishioka, a red, corrugated thing with bat ears that was inspired, by the appearance of bloodworms. Dracula’s long look at it suggests he’s as surprised by how it looks as we are. It’s astonishing. He kisses his “bride” Elisabeta (Ryder) in a way that’s just a little bit hotter than screen kisses usually are, and then the film launches directly into a desperate battle entirely backlit against a red process sky making it all seem like a two-dimensional show played out with shadow puppets and silhouettes. In an act of treachery, however, Elisabeta is fooled into believing Dracula has been killed on the field and, bereft, kills herself in another image of a fall from an impossibly-tall tower. I have no idea how they did that. A split-diopter holds her corpse in focus with her suicide note. A double-exposure has her plummeting slowly, mournfully on the page as he reads it. Dracula in his grief blasphemes, apostatizes, desecrates an altar with his sword and drinks the blood that begins to flood the chamber as he seals his pact with the darkness with an animal’s howl. Five minutes into the film, the title card appears and it’s among the best prologues of any film in not just the ’90s, but perhaps ever.

I saw this film at a promotional screening on the campus of the University of Colorado where I was a freshman. It was met with howls of derision at its “corniness” and what seemed to a few hundred children, a lack of sophistication in its visual effects. We thought Keanu Reeves’ accent as real estate agent and betrothed to sheltered Mina (Ryder, again), Jonathan Harker, was unfortunate — and the large emotions of the piece made us uncomfortable, frankly, when what we were looking for was just another scary movie. It was easy to mock, and mock we did. I was too young, too ignorant and inexperienced to have any sort of nostalgia for films made in this way. I hadn’t seen enough of them. I’d had girlfriends but I was too stupid in matters of the heart, too, to understand really what a love that surpasses reason was all about. Armed with the arrogance that comes from being young, I dismissed the movie.

And yet … it stuck in my mind. Moments so unshakeable and not only for me, that The Simpsons devoted an entire segment of one of their “Treehouse of Horrors” to recreating the seduction of Harker. I thought about the way Dracula’s shadow moves independent of him when I watched Murnau’s Nosferatu for the first time later that year. I thought about the set design when I later was introduced to Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Bram Stoker’s Dracula became one center, one key touchpoint, to my entire understanding of German Expressionism, then to Melies and early theories of film as a magician’s tool: an aid to sleight of hand and the illusionist’s art. Mostly, I thought about Thomas E. Sanders’ production design, Michael Ballhaus’ cinematography, Ishioka’s costumes, Wojciech Kilar’s jarring and lush orchestral score. I thought about Gary Oldman’s unhinged performance as the fiend himself, at the center of the film raving in a way that lands between Bela Lugosi and Frank Langella: twisted, operatic, and sexy… At times, overwhelmingly sexy. Revisiting the film years later, and then almost annually after a certain point, I started paying closer attention to the second half of the film, the one I’d always thought of as enervated, especially in comparison to the unquiet storm of the first. I had thought that way about the two halves of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket as well and, likewise, got smarter (as one, hopefully, does).

The pleasures of the first half of Bram Stoker’s Dracula are obvious. It’s dazzling. But I’ve come to prefer the more subtle pleasures of its second half, from Dracula’s seduction of Mina’s overheated friend Lucy (Sadie Frost) through to its final battle in the snowy Carpathians. I say “subtle” but every moment of this film is an astonishment. Dracula summoning the elements in his fury, blowing out a cavernous room full of candles; the bustling homogenous streets of Victorian London slashed through by the dapper, gray stove-piped European invader. “Vermin,” growls Van Helsing to an operating theater of students as he gives a demonstration of the feeding habits of the vampire bat, but he’s really talking about his bigotry in the face of what he perceives as a dilution of the pure blood of his people.

There are layers of social strata, then and sadly forever, to be unpacked from the text of this film. There is as much psycho-sexual upset in not just Harker’s orgiastic corruption before the lissome flesh of Dracula’s brides, but sapphically between Mina and Lucy as they chase one another through the barely-groomed English gardens of Lucy’s family’s sprawling estate. Desire is the focus of this film: Dracula’s love for his lost bride that causes him to believe Mina is her reincarnation, certainly; but also Coppola’s desire to create this bespoke, artisanal tribute to that thing Coppola loves only less than his family. He tells everything in exploding colors: filmy red shifts and clutches of suddenly-dying roses. Thirty-plus years after its initial release, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula has aged enough now as to appear timeless to a generation of filmgoers who will perceive anything made before their birth as “old.” For we who saw this when it was new, the film only becomes more blindingly new, year on year. Madness is an ancillary focus of the film inasmuch as it proceeds from desire: Dracula’s desire to be reunited with Elisabeta; Mina’s for Jonathan; Lucy’s for Mina and then Dracula; Van Helsing’s for Dracula. In time, every affection becomes infection with the danger posed by a demonic influence intruding into the places they believed were sacred.

What an incredibly modern film for this time, for our fractured and shattered time. The Dracula story is about repression and xenophobia and, so, here we are. In Coppola’s telling, it’s a ravishing, moveable feast for cinephiles. It’s a grand romance, told in bold strokes unembarrassed about its extravagance. It’s the definition of maximalism, a Cecille B. Demille film every bit as ecstatic as his The Ten Commandments (1956), that occurs at the end of only a modern master’s middle period. I can’t imagine any one of his “movie brat” peers — not Scorsese, nor DePalma, not even Spielberg — who could make a movie this naughty, bloody, this punk rock revolutionary. Coppola was always doing this. One From the Heart is huge in scale and ambition, and in its impossibility is the film most closely aligned to Dracula in his filmography. The Outsiders is pure rapture. We could go film by film. His The Conversation is my favorite film of all time, Apocalypse Now is my daughter’s. And Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the equal to either of them in scale, ambition and craft. It’s a staggering achievement: horny and delirious. Francis Ford Coppola is one of one.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.