United States, 1992
Directed by Francis Coppola
With Gary Oldman (Dracula), Winona Ryder (Mina Murray), Keanu Reeves (Jonathan Harker), Anthony Hopkins (Abraham Van Helsing), Richard E. Grant (Jack Seward), Sadie Frost (Lucy Westenra)
The first ever adaptation of the famous horror story written by Bram Stoker, has cast a long shadow on film history – “Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Graunens – Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror”, shot in 1922 by director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, was immediately, and rightly, viewed as a milestone of the German cinema’s Expressionism movement and of the horror genre, even if, ironically, it could not be formally and legally viewed as a true adaptation as Stoker’s family refused to grant the rights.
The shadow of this masterwork arguably covers much of the ground trodden by director Francis Coppola as he tries to deliver, based on a screenplay by James V. Hart, a fresh vision of Stoker’s text. The 1992 feature is eerily reminiscent of the development offered by the one released 70 years earlier, from silhouettes that unmistakably bring to mind the stunning physical features of Murnau’s lead actor, Max Schreck, to the odd reels screened during a biology lesson – when the name “Nosferatu” is not uttered time and again as the battle between good and evil shapes up (the name was borrowed from an ancient Greek word literally meaning “the bringer of the plague”). The cinematography may no longer use black and white reels but it is still driven by a sharp contrast involving this time, and from the early scene, bright red clashes with duller and darker forms, garishly highlighting, even stridently advertising, the tale’s bloody and hellish nature, while the interplay of lights and shadows are cleverly used in the first scenes at Dracula’s castle to show what a pervasive and baffling presence he is and to foretell his future grip on the characters.
Coppola seems to draw his inspiration from other sources, with the armors worn by the count Dracula as he battled and slaughtered his enemies in the 15th century, part of the awesome and lavish array of costumes conceived by designer Eiko Ishioka, clearly reminiscent (like the swordplay itself) of some Kurosawa Akira’s films (his 1980 “Kagemusha” for instance). But he also skillfully incorporates in the fabric of an arguably Baroque style the cutting edge of cinematic technology, the special effects proving as amazing as pervasive.
His story follows up to a point Murnau’s, blending it, however, with Stoker’s text, which means the film is in part set in Victorian Britain and no longer in a fanciful 19th century little German town. So a young, bright, and ambitious clerk is dispatched to Romania by his London-based employers to clinch a property deal with a very wealthy but a bit mysterious client, an old aristocrat keen on buying lots near a London church. The move has not been so easy to make, however, since Jonathan Harker was on the verge of marrying the delightful and delicate young lady he loves so tenderly, a genuinely and movingly requited passion. A bit disappointed, Mina Murray would bide her time at the luxurious home of her lively and cheeky friend from the upper class, Lucy Westenra, who has no less than three suitors she drives shamelessly mad.
Unlike those ladies, Jonathan Harker does not enjoy the time spent in the distant and forbidding corner of the Balkans where Dracula lives in his stunning but creepy old castle. He soon realizes he is a prisoner, forced to deal with malevolent supernatural creatures and under the sway of a vicious and dangerous host who, to his great worry, is fascinated by the portrait of Mina Murray that was in the clerk’s luggage.
The worst he feared happens: while Jonathan Harker is struggling against evil forces and despairing to find a way out, Dracula travels secretly to London and, displaying a younger face and soul clearly emerging from the fierce passion he feels for Mina Murray and that simply watching her whips up madly, sets about conquering the clerk’s fiancée. Using an alias, he finds the task challenging but not impossible. But it is another woman Dracula attacks and tames into a subservient, devious and pervert, creature who would be his assistant in his seduction game, Mina Murray’s best friend, the arguably already raunchy Lucy Westenra.
That in fact sets his story into a more risky path. Horrified by the strange ways and poor health that Lucy Westenra gets overnight, one of her suitors, a doctor and psychiatrist, Jack Seward, asks the help of one of his former professors, Abraham Van Helsing. The eccentric but perceptive doctor right away gathers what the problem is and launches his fight against the mythical vampire from Romania.
He gets the support of Jonathan Harker who has managed to run away from Dracula’s castle and even to marry with Mina Murray, in a hasty ceremony performed under the Romanian Orthodox rite, so afraid he is that Mina could fall under the spell of Dracula. But it may already too late for her, and anyway Dracula puts up a hectic fight soon playing out across the whole European continent. Chased by Abraham Van Helsing, Jack Seward, Jonathan Harker, and the two other suitors of Lucy Westenra, the cursed count may remain both an indestructible evil and the lover Mina Murray cannot herself help from respecting and obliging. But perhaps, counter-intuitively, this unnatural but unwavering love can bring the relief and redemption the tormented soul of Dracula needed and yet fulfill the hopeful expectations Jonathan Harker had for his wife.
At this point, it has been already a long time, which has been, to the audience’s delight and awe, full of truly dramatic, nicely horrific, wonderfully cinematic scenes emphasizing the director’s flair and his command of high-octane special effects pointedly conveying the savagery of the vampire and the frantic determination of his nemesis, since Coppola has been telling something more than Murnau. The hunt-like travel back to the Balkans was no part of the 1922 feature who ended in Germany and not with a full, satisfying, happy ending as the loved girl did die. But then Coppola wanted to be far more faithful to Stoker and to deliver a portrait in full of the titular character.
At least the 1992 film looks like the 1922 in this respect: both end in the place where they started – only if the German movie chose an imaginary German town, the American movie settles for an authentic Romania, and a wider time frame. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” swiftly introduces the historical character that imagination transformed into a vampire, a grim and gritty reconstruction of a 15th century world still partly shaped by the Middle Ages and riven by wars. Dracula’s story becomes a tale of despair and anger as a prince who has been successful though incredibly cruel in the battlefield comes back home to find his beloved wife dead, after she killed herself deceived by a treacherous message claiming her husband was killed. Dracula’s rage against his fate and his God is what changes his nature and fate, for the worse: his ordeal and savagery are in fact the consequence and the incarnation of a deep and searing sorrow. Conversely, his fancy about the foreigner’s lover stands for the hope love and hope can be his again.
This helps to suffuse a real romanticism in the scenes where Dracula and Mina Murray, who has been made painfully and starkly aware of who the count really is, even as Abraham Van Helsing and his sidekicks try hard to destroy him. Till the very end, the film plays a melodramatic note that keeps it at distance from the sheer horror Murnau explored in the vampire in his arresting and powerfully effective visual style and from what many in the theaters undoubtedly were waiting for with a vampire story told with the history, tropes, special effects the horror genre has acquired over the decades, especially since the 1970s. But it is, if one dares say, a more human story that has interested the director and that he successfully makes compelling and vibrant through the acting performances.
This is not only about feelings, though: in a sharp departure from Murnau, more attuned to Stoker, the film is, like the unforgettable character of Lucy Westenra, fare earthier. Eroticism is unequivocal and disturbing, the nexus between vampirism and sexual domination made plain through artful and astonishing scenes featuring the unfortunate victims Jonathan Harker and Lucy Westenra are, which are more than a display of terrific and terrible special effects and uncanny creatures but also an unsettling exploration of sensuality – even while the sex scenes between the unmasked Dracula and the spellbound Mina suggest romanticism rather than lust, a telling contrast. That makes Coppola’s obviously a wider, deeper vision than Murnau’s, or probably others. A superbly Baroque creation where impulses wildly run though the successive tableaux his flair and his crew craftily conceived, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” turns out to be another jewel in the trove that Coppola’s filmography often seems to be.