Francis Ford Coppola makes a persuasive case for an excessive Dracula, with Gary Oldman and the costumes doing much of the persuading. The storytelling is muddled and the performances uneven, but Gothic romantics should find plenty to enjoy.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a good Gothic romance with an unreliable supply of scares, and we would happily put up with its unevenness again. Working from James V. Hart’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, Coppola makes desire as important as the business of frightening us. The trouble starts when the film expects all that fervour to explain relationships which the script has not made clear enough. Still, there is conviction in its excess, especially when Gary Oldman is allowed to dominate.
Oldman plays Dracula with enough seriousness to make the extravagance around him seem reasonable, at least while he is on screen. He gives the romance an urgency that the film cannot always get from its dialogue. There is a temptation with such a role to rely on the costume and wait for everyone else to react, but he keeps supplying the feeling himself. His count holds our attention even when Coppola has filled the image with things competing for it.
Michael Ballhaus’s photography gives the elaborate sets and clothes room to register, rather than treating them as background to the actors. Thomas E. Sanders’s production design works because the sets look as extravagant as the performances, keeping Oldman from seeming stranded in an otherwise sober film. Eiko Ishioka’s costumes go further, making the clothes central to how we read these people before they speak. We were delighted by their excess, especially the way they encourage us to accept Dracula’s grand manner.
The in-camera effects have a similar appeal, openly inviting us to enjoy the trick as well as the supernatural threat. Editors Anne Goursaud, Glen Scantlebury and Nicholas C. Smith assemble the images into busy montages that keep finding something new to look at. That gives the film momentum even when the story becomes hard to follow, although the cutting cannot supply the missing dramatic clarity. Wojciech Kilar’s music makes the romance sound enormous, which fits the acting even when the dialogue has not earned it.
The actors are less consistent. Keanu Reeves’s Jonathan Harker is stiff, and the accent makes the effort of the performance too audible. Tom Waits, as Renfield, understands how to be peculiar without seeming uncertain about what sort of film he is in. Coppola needed to bring the other performances closer to that confidence, particularly when the dialogue is doing the work of keeping the story comprehensible.
Most critics disagree with us, regarding the spectacle as silly and the lack of sustained fear as a failure. We think they give too little weight to the romance: Oldman’s performance and the pleasure of the effects provide ample reason to stay. Gothic horror benefits from suggestion and suppressed desire, and Coppola’s insistence on putting everything on display does cost him suspense. It also makes the film’s enthusiasm hard to resist, though anyone expecting a steady tightening of dread is likely to be frustrated.
The 128-minute running time is generous enough to make the muddle noticeable. A firmer script and more consistent cast would have helped, but we would not want Coppola to tidy away everything unruly here. Watch it for Oldman, and accept that the rest of the cast will not always keep up.
