I was seven years old when Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula came out, so I was barely aware that it even existed until a few years ago, when Gary Oldman had just been cast as Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and someone mentioned that included in his pantheon of Crazy Villainous Characters was Count Dracula.
The full feature film is available on Hulu (although you have to register and be over 17 to watch it), so I figured, why not?
Okay.
First of all, I'm not sure I've ever seen a Coppola movie before, but I was under the impression that he's regarded as a great, talented director. Did he lose a bet with Scorsese or something? Because this was...not what I'd expected. On paper, it sounds like an amazing movie: Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Gary Oldman (GARY OLDMAN!) with Anthony Hopkins (SIR ANTHONY HOPKINS!), Richard E. Grant, and the woefully underrated Cary Elwes (AKA Wesley, the Dread Pirate Roberts), back when he was still young and dreamy. Then you throw in Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder and everything goes to hell.
Oldman gnaws on the scenery with everything he's got, Sadie Frost makes her topless film debut, the women do lots of moaning and writhing and exposing of breasts, Keanu sounds like the Britishest dude in Malibu, and Tom Waits hangs out a window, screaming for his master. Then we get this moment of weirdness:
Maybe I'm just coming to this from the wrong generational viewpoint -- most of the reviews on Hulu are from people who saw the movie when it came out and are surprisingly laudatory, with criticism only for Ryder & Reeves -- but I only found Dracula entertaining because it was so terrible. I'm so used to Gary Oldman in his recent, subtler performances (and less evil, e.g. Potter's Sirius Black and Jim Gordon of the Batman movies) that this hissing, writhing, amped-up monster of a villain just seems silly. Speaking of silly, Keanu's accent is too God-awful to take seriously, much like the attempt to give him gray hair after his harrowing foursome with Dracula's three vampire wives. Keanu, darling, you're adorable, but perhaps you ought to stick to silent films or modeling. Winona's in a little better, but whenever she opens her mouth, I just hear Veronica's diary entries from Heathers ("Dear Diary...").
I did catch the line "You are my life now," which landed itself in Twilight a decade later, and managed to sound even creepier coming from Edward Cullen, and the whole long-lost One True Love thing turned up in The Vampire Diaries, I believe, which just goes to show you how little there really is to draw from when it comes to vampire lore. We're going to run out of innovative ways to make them compelling before too long (although I will love True Blood until its dying day) -- remember the zombie craze of a couple years ago? What happened to that? It's only a matter of time before the girls who started their adolescences in the Age of Twilight figure out that there are other (living, better-written) fish in the sea. As for the post-vampire heyday fantasy world, there have been some interesting theories put forward as to what the next craze might be.
In any case, I don't know where this movie went wrong, but it's a shame that something with such promise fails to deliver, and that after winning three Oscars (costume design, sound editing, & makeup), it isn't nearly as impressive seventeen years later. Sorry, Dracula, but I'm not a fan.
P.S. I just realized that Bill Campbell, the actor playing the poor, doomed American, Quincey Morris, is actually Billy Campbell, the dad from Once and Again and the unlikely abusive husband from that Jennifer Lopez movie, Enough. Huh. The things you learn from the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment