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.

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights: Adapatation, Interpretation and Modernization

 

After watching Andrea Arnold’s magnificent Wuthering Heights I began to think about the difference between adaptation and interpretation. What is the difference? For me, adaptation means a filmmaker or artist is adapting a work to another medium, like film or television, but interpretation is when the filmmaker takes the source material and approaches from a different angle, changing something within the source material to fit their vision. This is common in superhero films where there is much leeway in adapting certain characters to the screen. Of course, this can be very controversial when source material is altered but it can lead to interesting results. A film, or what have you, can be both an adaptation and an interpretation at the same time, with some leaning more towards a literal “book on film” approach.

 

 

Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is more of an interpretation than merely an adaptation. Moreover, one has to put aside any expectations he or she may have about literary adaptations, particularly adaptations of Emily Bronte’s immortal classic. Her film is the exact opposite of the stereotypes we associate with period pieces- stodginess, awards bait, dry- this is a raw, naturalistic yet lyrical and sometimes unsettling work. It trims down, like other adaptations of Wuthering Heights, the plot, but instead of feeling abridged for truncated, the piece feels like a whole- it feels like an actual film, richly cinematic, almost a silent film (the dialogue is very sparse)- almost Malickian in its appreciation and focus on nature.

 

 

 From my memory of Bronte’s novel, not much of the plot is changed, but we never feel the film is just the book on screen. As I mentioned earlier, it’s not heavy with dialogue, and I don’t believe much of the dialogue is actually from the novel. Coming back to the theme of what makes this more of an interpretation rather a strict adaptation, Arnold approaches the novel from a strictly cinematic perspective. It communicates its emotions through visuals and mood. It’s a film we really need to pay attention to- to watch and soak in. I wish I had been able to witness this film on a large theatre screen. The images are so beautiful and textured that I want to get lost in them. I feel the cinema screen is always the best way to experience film, particularly a film like this.

One of the most significant interpretative elements in this film is Arnold’s casting of black actors in the role of Heathcliff (Solomon Glave as young Heathcliff and James Howson as the older Heathcliff). At first glance, this seems like a major change-and it is- but at the same time, making Heathcliff black while keeping the other major characters Caucasian feels truer to the spirit of Bronte’s novel. While Heathcliff wasn’t black in the novel, he was intended to be of an unspecified ethic origin (a gypsy I believe) which is why he was an outsider in this world. I don’t believe Heathcliff was supposed to be the image of a matinee idol like Laurence Olivier. With the casting a black actors, Arnold gets to the heart of Bronte’s fascination and empathy with the idea of the outsider. Critic David Fear, in his video essay on the DVD, parallels Heathcliff with Bronte, highlighting the fact that Bronte herself was an outsider in her time. Despite being a male character, Heathcliff was a very personal character for Bronte.

 

 

By making Heathcliff black, Arnold not only gets (arguably) closer to Bronte’s conception of Heathcliff, she re-contextualizes Heathcliff’s sufferings as the sufferings of people of African descent- despite the film not taking place in the United States. I think Heathcliff being black allows for a more relatable and contemporary entry point for audiences.  And the film, despite taking place in the same era as the novel. It can be difficult making a period piece feel modern- the easy way out would be to set it in modern day- which was Arnold’s original intent.  But Arnold finds the balance between setting the film in the past as well as making it feel contemporary. I think she manages this by using a hand held camera work, putting the audience right in the middle of events, making us feel like we’ve been transported in the past. Arnold’s work with cinematographer Robbie Ryan makes the moors of Wuthering Heights feel real to us, allowing us to view this world as a realistic place that existed for people- that was modern and common. I think that’s the key to Arnold’s mastery of modernizing the past.