Oceans of Time: "Bram Stoker's Dracula"

Spoilers Below

We don't make films that look and like Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula anymore. It belongs to the era that also gave us Tim Burton's Batman Returns and Joel Schumacher's 2 Batman films, as well as

Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, singular, director driven movies with big budgets and based on popular source material. Dracula and Batman Returns owe themselves more to German expressionism and silent movies than Hollywood conventions. While we have auteur driven big budget films from the likes of Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve it's hard to imagine either them making something as campy, avant-garde and erotic as this film. They're both too sexless to make an sexual film. Robert Eggers is doing his Nosferatu remake but that's probably going to be a more somber affair without the camp humour of this film. But to be fair, the guy who put a decapitated horse's head in a guy's bed and had Marlon Brando talk about polio doesn't necessarily seem like anyone's idea of a sexy filmmaker. However, Coppola's career and style has always been varied and unpredictable. 

Coppola's style is defined by its fluidity and adaptation, fitting his style to what the film needs- from the novelistic quality of The Godfather films, the surreal nightmarishness of Apocalypse Now, the chilly paranoia of The Conversation, and the lowkey fantasy of Peggy Sue Got Married. He also doesn't box himself by genre. He took the gangster film and put on a Shakespearean scale with both parts of The Godfather, combined the gangster and musical genres with The Cotton Club, and made a war film as strange and atmospheric as Apocalypse Now. Dracula is a horror film but it's also a gothic romance blended with the avant-garde and camp. It also wasn't the first time Coppola delved in to the gothic. When he enrolled in UCLA film school, he directed couple of short horror films, Two Christophers, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson, and Ayamonn The Terrible, about a sculptor's nightmares coming to life. In 1963 Coppola was one of several uncredited directors on Roger Corman's The Terror, starring Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson. Coppola's first full length feature was the Psycho-inspired Dementia 13.  And one can detect Coppola's horror roots in the horse's head and murder of the five families sequences from The Godfather. 

Before Dracula, Coppola returned to this greatest financial and artistic success with The Godfather Part III. And thematically Dracula begins where that film ends. After seeking legitimacy throughout the film  Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) witnesses his daughter Mary (Sofia Coppola) murdered by assassins meant to kill him. In 1462 Romanian knight Vlad Dracula (Gary Oldman) returns home from his war against the Ottoman Empire to find his wife Elisabetta (Winona Ryder) has committed suicides after the Ottomans reported him dead. Dracula is enraged that after fighting for God this same God didn't prevent his wife's death (and since it was a suicide she won't be allowed in to Heaven). Dracula renounces God and, in an expressionistic piece of storytelling. drinks the blood from a stone cross,  making him in to a vampire. Both Michael and Dracula lose loved ones to their enemies and if Godfather Part III's ending reminds us of King Lear, Dracula's prologue brings to mind Romeo & Juliet, which Coppola does reference in one of the behind the scenes documentaries, as well as Ophelia's suicide from Hamlet. So, Coppola, as he did with the Godfather films, is taking a piece oggenre fiction and reinterpreting it as operatic tragedy. Dracula's howl of pain before cutting to the title is probably the film's most effective emotional moment, for me. 

Coppola said in interviews he felt the other adaptations of Dracula never really did the book, so with his interpretation is was an attempt to follow Bram Stoker's novel more closely- the official title of this film is Bram Stoker's Dracula and Coppola always likes giving the author credit. However, I believe the love story element is something screenwriter James V. Hart added (Hart also did two other literary adaptations, Steven Spielberg's Hook. Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein and, of all things, Muppet Treasure Island). I've never read Stoker's novel but I do know it's told via letters and journal entries, which Hart and Coppola reference throughout the film. And of course there's this great (practical shot of Jonathan Harker's (Keanu Reeves) diary in the foreground while a train runs across the screen in the background. The diary was an oversized book and the train was an actual miniature train. 

Harker (Keanu Reeves) is  the young solicitor who, in 1897, comes to Dracula's castle to arrange his real estate acquisitions in London. His fiancee, Mina Murray (Ryder, again), is the reincarnated Elisabeta and when Dracula sees her picture it becomes his goal to seek her out. Without the use of flashbacks, we're left to imagine the hundreds of years Dracula has been undead. He feels like the loneliest, most haunted Dracula to grace the screen. This was Oldman back when he really threw himself in to these offbeat villain roles and such a chameleon that I remember knowing someone who joked he wasn't sure what Oldman actually looked like. Oldman certainly knows what kind of movie he's in and is able to pull off the campy, gothic and theatrical side of the character while also bringing real pathos to his tragic longing, specifically when he transitions from decrepit count to handsome and seductive Prince Vlad. 

Reeves. dodgy accent aside, is endearing as Harker, and works as a proper contrast to Oldman. Reeves' Harker is sexually non-threatening, kind of dull, as opposed to Prince Vlad, a more sexually exciting prospect, challenging the Victorian restrictiveness Mina she's used to. But the relationship between Dracula and  is where my problems with the film begin. I just have a hard time getting swept up emotionally as much as I'd like with the film's love story. I'm not even sure if Oldman and Ryder even have chemistry. I do wonder what the film would've been like with a young Kate Winslet or Rachel Weisz. I also have a problem in general, I think with these kind of heightened love stories. I prefer lower-key, more developed and slower burn romances instead of the more melodramatic kind. for which the film is going. It's a little bit like what Coppola's friend and contemporary George Lucas was attempting in Attack of the Clones with Anakin and Padme. I liked the idea behind the romance but I don't believe it pulled it off that well. However, I think the romance in Dracula is better acted. 

Dracula is one of those films that leads with its aesthetics and mood rather than strong storytelling. If the first 2 Godfather films are like a great novel on screen than Dracula feels like an overproduced Broadway play. This isn't to say there aren't visual pleasures to be found here. The in-camera practical effects are terrific, and they make the film, especially with the stuff in Dracula's castle, reminiscent of a 1920s silent film. Honestly, I'd watch a whole film set in this film's version of late 15th century Transylvania, an expressionistic fairy tale where Dracula fights silhouettes of shadow puppets instead of actors. I also love Dracula's armour, which is like a sci-fi take on Japanese samurai armour. In Elizabeth Joy Glass' piece on the film's costumes (Designing Fear: Bram Stoker's Dracula - The Art of Costume), she discusses how at  the beginning of  production, Coppola said "The costumes will be the set." Glass adds that Coppola "wanted the costumes to be visually exciting set pieces, and set the film's atmosphere." Coppola enlisted Eiko Ishioka, who had designed the Japanese poster for Apocalypse Now,  and who at the time only had a couple of costume credits but she would go on to win the Oscar for Best Costume Design. The Simpsons homaged the film's most famous outfit, Dracula's red coat, along with his hundred-of-years-old white make up and what I once heard described as the "boob head." Lucy (Sadie Frost), Mina'a friend who Dracula turns in to a vampire also has a striking funeral/death dress that's a highlight "set piece Watching the film, it's clear what Coppola was going for. Moreso than the settings, the film's costumes- significantly Dracula's different looks, which rival Padme's in The Phantom Menace- define the film's mix of realism and stylization, where certain scenes feel like they're an authentic depiction of the period, while others, like the scenes in Dracula's castle, feel very theatrical and exaggerated. This helps create a distinction between Dracula's world and the more normal world of Victorian England, which then becomes invaded by Dracula's presence.

But coming back to what I was saying, the storytelling and character work does take a backseat to the costumes and the mood. Don't get me wrong, I'll all about visual style and I hate the expression "style over substance." And I do feel strong visual style and directing can overcome a film's other issues. But like Ridley Scott's Legend, a film that also draws me back because of its strong aesthetics (I know, I'm using that word a lot), I wish I could get more in to Dracula emotionally or at least on a entertainment level. There's some grade A Anthony Hopkins ham from his performance as Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who's brought in to the fray after  Lucy is turned in to a vampire. Hopkins was right off his Oscar win for The Silence of The Lambs and one wishes the movie was just Hopkins vs. Oldman, in a similar vein to the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Hammer Horror Dracula movies. There's definitely a more entertaining film in here about Helsing and Dr. Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant), Lucy's fiancée, Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes), and Texan Quincy Morris (Billy Campbell) facing off against Dracula. 

So, the film isn't emotionally engaging on the love story level, and it's not fun enough despite the Hopkins bits, so it ends up unsatisfying as both a romance and an entertaining horror film. The sincere romanticism and the camp are also never completely reconciled. Though the film's unwieldy nature gives it its beguiling and esoteric allure. Like Lucas, Coppola is a experimental director at heart, more so than his populist success would lead you to believe. I feel that if Lucas would've kept directing movies after the original Star Wars, he may have eventually become who Coppola is now, a director whose films are outside of the mainstream and experimental. Dracula is one of Coppola's last true commercial films, followed by Jack (1996) and the John Grisham adaptation  The Rainmaker (1997).  He has just completed production on his long-gestating project Megalopolis, a sci-fi film about an architect attempting rebuild New York in to a utopia after a disaster. 

Dracula is a film I always return to, wanting to love it more than I do and it has grown on me in certain respects, though I can't say it's a complete success. However, it's such an distinctive film of excess and theatricality that I'll always go back to for its strong visual design fun performances. A little over 30 years after its release, there's still never anything quite like Coppola's gothic, camp, whatever you want to call it, opus.

My Favourite Best Picture Winners

Spoilers Below 

In my last post I wrote about 10 films which didn't get nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Now, I want to discuss my favourite winners in this category, ones where I think the Academy got it (pretty much) right. The Oscars are always a fascinating snapshot in time. They're reflective of what people liked in the moment more than what lasts. But these films certainly have. So, let's get on with the list.

Casablanca

The late Roger Ebert once wrote of Carol Reed's The Third Man, that more than any film he had seen it embodied the romance of going to the movies. I feel that way about Casablanca. From its witty and poignant script, to the intrigue, the romance and its heroic finale, Casablanca has everything. It's pretty much a perfect film, maybe the best film to come out of the golden age of Hollywood. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, even if they had never starred in anything else significant, would still be immortalizes forever as Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund. Rick is the cynical cafe owner, Ilsa is the woman he loved and left him because she was secretly married to resistance leader Victor Lazlo, and whom walks back in to his life. Rick. who's in possession of stolen letters of transit, is the only one who can help Ilsa and Victor out of Casablanca. But will his torch for Ilsa stop him from doing so? Yes, we know he'll do the right thing but its how we get there that matters. 

Lawrence of Arabia

The king of al epic movies, only rivaled by The Lord of The Rings, if you count that as one movie. The reason I call Lawrence of Arabia such is it's a great character study as well as a technical marvel. You have movies like the Star Wars prequels which  are conceptually and technically impressive but character and story-wise needed some script refining. And then you have certain superhero films which have some great character stuff but are compromised by formula, weak spectacle and uninteresting direction- but with Lawrence of Arabia, neither the character work or the grand-scale filmmaking feel anything less than stellar.. Another thing thing that impresses about the film is how effectively it both romanticizes T.E Lawrence while also portraying him as a complex, sometimes terrifying figure whom the audience is free to interpret the character, the man, however they like. In the greatest screen debut in cinema history, Peter O'Toole is beautiful, almost feminine, giving a performance that combines grace and madness. This is a mythic and majestic film.

The Godfather and The Godfather Part II

The great epic of American cinema, and still the only time a film and its sequel have both won Best Picture. It's hard to imagine that feat ever being replicated. I guess it's cheating to list both Godfathers under one heading but they compliment each other so well and tell one sprawling story that it makes sense to list them side by side. Michael Corleone's (Al Pacino) transformation from war hero and the good son who didn't want to become part of the family business to ruthless mob boss who will murder his own brother for his act of betrayal is possibly cinema's greatest character arc. That Pacino didn't win for either is one of Oscar's greatest travesties. Michael's arc is complimented by Part II's showing of how his father Vito went from orphan in Sicily to Don in turn of the century New York. These flashback add to the sprawling nature of the narrative, with Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro both winning Oscars for their performance as the Don. 

Director Francis Ford Coppola and novelist Mario Puzo, working from Puzo's popular novel, took the gangster film and put it on a Shakespearean scale while creating a lived in world with authentic people. The films are operatic yet subtle and nuanced. They also transport us back in time to early 1900s New York, post war New York and late 1950s Havana, just before revolution. These are simply unrivaled feats of filmmaking from the Hollywood studio system.

The Silence of the Lambs

The last film to win the top five Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay), and one that has only gotten better with age. While Anthony Hopkins is iconic as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, it's Jodie Foster as F.B.I trainee Clarice Sterling, on the trail of serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) who gives this film its grounding and heart.  The film's director, the late Jonathan Demme, was a master of the close-up, using them to show the perspective of characters looking at each other. The film blends the gothic and realistic in such a way that we accept them both as existing in the same world. And again, it's Foster who grounds the whole thing.

The Apartment

The optimistic cynic, Billy Wilder, along with his longtime collaborator, I.A.L Diamond, crafted a perfect screenplay for The Apartment, the story of C.C. "Bud" Baxter, an office worker who lends his apartment to his superiors for their extramarital affair. It's already a difficult situation for Bud, having to spend nights out in the cold, getting him sick. Things get more complicated when he discovers his boss Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) is having an affair with Elevator girl Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the object of Bud's affection. All of this could be contrived but Wilder and Diamond's script, along with Wilder's direction, create believable characters whose actions make sense, even in a scenario such as this. It's established that this whole apartment lending situation started out with just one guy wanting to use Bud's apartment and then escalated to many men at the office wanting to use the apartment, with Bud using it to his advantage, being granted perks by the higher-ups. Bud is selling his soul but Lemmon is such a likable and sympathetic everyman that we aren't immediately offput by his actions. Bud's not a bad guy and we can see how we could end up in a predicament like this. 

I always feel that Wilder's dramas were very funny and his comedies very dark. The Apartment walks the line between comedy and drama so expertly that that it feels unbalanced. And like many other Wilder films, it ends on the perfect note.

No Country For Old Men

I just re-watched this and man does it hold up. This is a fantastic movie that's only gotten better with age. It's one of the perfect matches of source material (Cormac McCarthy's novel) and filmmakers (the Coen brothers). From their first film, Blood Simple (1984), the Coens have played around with genre conventions, creating films that both belong in their respective genres but also exist somewhat outside them. There's an offbeat quality to their work, with No Country For Old Men being populated by familiar types who are also different from anyone else we've encountered before. Hit man Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem in an Oscar winning performance), with his weird haircut and pre-occupation with a coin toss- a flip of faith- is one of the most unusual villains in recent memory, genuinely terrifying whenever he shows up. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is the "good old boy" who's smarter than we may at first realize, a character who would be a supporting player, killed off pretty early in another film but takes center stage here. And then there's Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who we assume is maybe going to be killed when he catches up to Chigurh, but narrowly misses him. 

The movie sets us a up for a showdown between Moss (Josh Brolin), who has stolen 2 million from a drug deal gone bad, and  Chigurh but Moss is killed offscreen,  and the final scene is Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) talks to his wife about two dreams he had- "Then I woke up" is the final line, cutting to black. There's no satisfying resolution to anything. It's a bleak but it fits the noir style, where there are no heroes or heroic endings. The villain gets away and the survivor, Bell, retires because he doesn't know how to deal with the new kind of evil he's seeing in the world now, though ultimately this kind of evil, the evil Chigurh represents, has been forever, with Chigurh being a devil/grim reaper figure, haunting the whole film

Amadeus 

Maybe it's my own feeling of mediocrity that makes Amadeus the most relatable film to be, but I think it's also a brilliant idea to tell the story of a great artist through the perspective of the bitter rival who wasn't as great. Peter Shaffer's play was the basis for Milos Foreman's glorious film, one of the best of the 80s, a decade that's not one of my favourite, despite some great films. F. Murray Abraham, received a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the proud but jealous and old-fashioned Antonio Salieri, while Tom Hulce was nominated for his performance along Abraham for his mischievous performance as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart is childish but also serious when it comes to music. The fact that such an immature young man could be so talent enrages Salieri but he but he feels guilt for Mozart's death, believing he killed him.

On the Waterfront

If you were going to ask me what my favourite performance of all time is, I would say Marlon Brando's Oscar wining performance as Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. This is Brando at the peak of his physical beauty and acting abilities. While A Streetcar Named Desire established his image, and The Godfather his most iconic, On the Waterfront is his most sensitive and tender work, masculine but feminine. Movies are time capsules that can keep an actor forever young in their prime, and that's what this film is for me when it comes to Brando. 

Of course, the film's director, Elia Kazan, was the ultimate actors' director, his films being defined by a rawer, more naturalistic style of acting, and the film is full of other superb performances, including Eva Marie Saint (who won Best Supporting Actress), Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger When Kazan won an honorary Oscar in the late 90s (on of Oscar's most controversial moments), Martin Scorsese called Kazan a poetic realist, and you can see why just by looking at this film, which blends realism with stylish flourishes. 

The story is that of  Malloy, who testifies against the mob boss (Cobb) who runs the docks. Malloy has to decide between loyalty to this father figure and doing the right thing, which could lead to redemption for Malloy after being involved in the murder of another dock worker.

Rebecca

Hitchcock's first film in America, and the only Hitchcock film to win Best Picture (Hitchcock's other 1940 film Foreign Correspondent was also nominated) and on Hitchcock attributed more to producer David. O Selznick than himself. However, the Hitchcock is not absent in this entertaining gothic melodrama, base Daphne Du Maurier's splendid novel (one of my favourites), about a  unnamed woman (Joan Fontaine) who marries a rich widower, Max de Winter (Laurence Oliver), who former wife's presence still haunts his home of Manderley. Fontaine and Oliver were both nominated for their performances (Fontaine would win the next year for another Hitchcock film, Suspicion, with Cary . Grant) and Judith Anderson is sublimely creepy as Manderley's housemaid Mrs. Danvers, who still adores Rebecca. I wrote more about the film here: Davies in the Dark: The Essential Films: "Rebecca" (1940) (thenoirzone.blogspot.com)  

So, what are your favourite Best Picture winners? Comment and let me know. 

Desert Island DVDs

Recently critc Matt Zoller Seitz asked fellow critics to pick the ten films they'd want to take with them if they were stuck on a desert island. The rules were to pick ten films, one season of television and one short. I posted mine on Jim Emerson's blog, Scanners. I want to post it here as well just for fun.

Films (In no particular order, except for number one)

1. Casablanca- When asked what my favourite film is I pick this one. Roger Ebert said of Carol Reed's The Third Man that it captures the romance of going to the movies for him. I feel that way about this film. Romantic, funny, heroic and ultimately a little tragic, Casablanca has never failed to entertain or move me.

2. Casino Royale (2006)- My favourite Bond film. It may not be a perfect movie but in it's own way it's a perfect Bond film in that it combines fantastical action sequences with a grounded humanity, never escalating in to camp. The romance between Bond and Vesper Lynd is heartbreaking and establishes why Bond is such an emotionally cold bastard sometimes.

3. The Haunting (1963)- A really fun and spooky haunted house film. The fact that you never see a ghost makes it all the more terrifying and surprisingly satisfying.

4. The Apartment (1960)- Billy Wilder's romantic comedy blends humour and tenderness with cynicism and interesting social commentary very well. I think I like this more than Wilder's film before this, Some Like It Hot.

5. Out of the Past- It really encapsulates the film noir genre/style. While romance may not be what one automatically thinks of when they think "film noir" but the doomed romances at the heart of this film are integral to the psychology of the film noir anti-hero.

6. Shutter Island- This may sound blasphemous but this may be my favourite Scorsese film.

7. Hamlet (1996)- I'd need my Shakespeare fix and Kenneth Branagh's epic is my favourite Shakespearean adaptation on film.

8. Rear Window- Hitchcock is my favourite director and it's insanely difficult to pick only one. I think I would go with this one.  It takes something which sounds uncinematic and makes it in to pure cinema.       

9.  The Godfather- Mafia life played at almost Shakespearean heights.

10. The Pink Panther Strikes Back- My favourite of the series

Television: Season Five of The Simpsons
Short: Someone on Emerson's blog picked Geri's Game, which played before Pixar's A Bug's Life. It's the short where the old man plays chess with himself. I think I'd have to pick this one as well.

This is a fun but very difficult game. There are so many more more films I could have swapped with the ones on this list. It would take me too long to list all of them. I encourage everyone to try this exercise. It gives you a sense of the films you really can't live without...and you realize there's a lot!