Bram Stoker's Dracula 1992 Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

 Bram Stoker's Dracula 1992

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

So the story of this film actually starts with the production of Godfather III. Winona Ryder was originally meant to play Mary, the daughter of Michael Corleone. She had, however, just finished filming three movies back to back and when she arrived in Rome, she had a 104 temperature and could barely move (oh Jesus). She was told that she would need to recover from her fever before even thinking of working again. Coppola, who was in a hurry because his debtors were at the door, cast his daughter Sofia Coppola as Mary in Godfather III the successful but widely considered worst Godfather film. Francis Coppola survived of course but Ms. Ryder, afraid she had managed to burn a bridge with one of the most well-regarded directors in Hollywood. set up a meeting to mend bridges. She brought a script with her, and as she was leaving suggested Coppola might like it but was privately sure he wouldn't touch it. However, Coppola was a Dracula fan and when he saw the title, he was all in. Let's go ahead and look at our director first before we dive in ourselves.

Francis Ford Coppola was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 7, 1939. The middle child of three, he was a third-generation American, with his grandparents on both sides having come to the US from southern Italy. His paternal grandparents came from Basilicata while his maternal grandparents came from Naples. His father was a professional flutist and when he was offered the job of principal flutist for the NBC Symphony Orchestra the family moved to New York, settling in Queens. Coppola contracted polio as a child and was bedridden for long periods as a result of it. He turned to homemade puppet shows and reading to fill those long hours before moving up to 8mm film. Coppola also excelled at subjects he was interested in but tended to be rather lackluster in other subjects making him an overall mediocre student. He entered Hofstra College in 1955 as a major in theater arts but after seeing October: Ten Days that Shook the World he decided that cinema was where his passion lay. He founded the cinema workshop at Hofstra and contributed heavily to the campus literary magazine. After graduating he headed off to UCLA Film School in 1960, by 1962 he was working regularly for film companies and was recruited by Roger Corman. In 1963 he directed the first feature film that he had written himself using leftover funds from one of Roger Corman's films. It was on the set of that film Dementia 13 that he met his wife. I should note he's still married to her, which is a hell of an achievement in Hollywood. By 1969 Coppola was running loose and would soon become one of the linchpins of a group of filmmakers known as “New Hollywood”. This group would challenge the established system and among other things champion the director as the king of the filmmaking process. It's as part of this movement that we see his greatest works, like The Godfather, or the script he wrote for the film Patton. It's beyond the scope of this review to go into any great detail on Coppola's career, but I'm just gonna state that even if you've never seen any of his films, you know them because half the jokes on the Simpsons and other pop culture mainstays are derived from Coppola films.

Now as always the film will get two grades, the first being how it stands up on its own and the second how it stands up as an adaptation. Now since the movie is almost 30 years old, I don't have any problems with spoilers so y'all been warned. The film starts with a prologue showing Dracula battling on Crusade (Not technically a crusade), only for the Turks to trick his wife into killing herself (Those wiley Turks!  Insert comment about getting away the Armenian Genocide here.). This enrages Dracula who renounces God and is turned into a vampire for it. Which as origin stories go is to the point and makes a certain degree of sense, but if it was that easy to be turned into a vampire, you'd think we'd be up to our eyes in hideous bloodsuckers (I’d have been a vampire a long time ago.  In fairness, he renounced God in a fairly spectacular fashion. {Maybe you should have stabbed a cross with a broadsword?}). The movie then jumps into the plot of the novel, starting with John Harker's trip to Romania, his imprisonment by the count, and his escape. Meanwhile in England Lucy must choose between her three suitors and Mina waits for her husband to come home. Until she meets a dark stranger on the street and starts to engage in an affair (In fairness, it seems to me that Dracula was psychically and perhaps unconsciously manipulating her.). When she receives a letter from an asylum letting her know that John has been found and wants to see her, she breaks off the affair in a spasm of guilt and rushes off to her soon-to-be-husband. It's hard to feel sorry for Dracula though because the whole time he's been assaulting (Let’s be fair, raping.  It was rape.) and slowly feeding on Mina's best friend Lucy. Now I'm supposed to find this relationship between Mina and Dracula romantic but you know what? Murdering your beloved best friend is not a romantic gesture! If anything it strongly implies that Drac is trying to isolate Mina, which is kind of a red flag! Seriously folks, if your boy or girlfriend keeps trying to destroy your friendships and split you away from everyone else? It's a bad sign! (It is in fact the hallmark of an abuser.  There is practically a manual.) Stop romanticizing this! For that matter, there's an implication that he's using his mental powers to push her into choosing him.  This is also really creepy.  Anyways, upset that Mina has broken up with him, in favor of her... You know... Actual spouse (Fun fact for everyone, the marriage between Mina and Johnathon was filmed in a Greek Orthodox church in LA and the priests used the real rite [You’d think the priest would like, change something because he knew it was for a movie, but nope!]. So Winona and Keenu might be actually married in the Orthodox church. Imagine explaining that on the third date! [In fairness, intent matters.  So I don’t think it would actually take. {Most modern Christianity would say you cannot be married against your will.  God won't sanction such a union}]) Dracula decides to finish off Lucy and drain her completely. He does this despite the best efforts of Dr. Seward and Dr. Helsing, who figures out there's a vampire involved when Lucy grows fangs and starts trying to drain people dry (Pretty obvious signs.  By the way, Helsing is extremely happy when he figures this out, and it is fantastic to watch Anthony Hopkins chew scenery.). Despite seeing Lucy grow a whole new set of teeth, the others are unconvinced until Helsing drags them into Lucy's tomb and they see her up and about and getting ready to have a small child for dinner!

The movie kicks into high gear here, with John recognizing Dracula on the street, while Mina stands between her husband and Dracula and frantically hopes that Dracula doesn't mention that they've met. Repeatedly and illicitly. The boy's plot to kill a predator while Mina mopes until Dracula shows up in her bedroom one last time and starts the process to turn her into a vampire. After that, the boys, under the leadership of Dr. Helsing, chase Dracula down to his home and almost kill him until Mina jumps in with a rifle to defend him but ends up doing the job herself and declares that it was Dracula's and her love for each other that saved them both.

So what did I like? The cast is great for the most part. Gary Oldman throws himself into the role of Dracula as if immortality is hidden somewhere in the scenery he's chewing. Sir Anthony Hopkins is right there dueling him for each piece with a larger than life performance that shows just how imbalanced Van Helsing is and I love it. Cary Elwes plays Arthur fairly well but I feel he's kinda wasted here and not given enough to do; the same can be said of Billy Campbell playing Quincey Morris. Winona Ryder does her part really well, to the point that I didn't realize that she and Gary Oldman actually were feuding during the filming (Yeeaaaah.). Keanu Reeves is the weakest part of the cast, to be honest, but … Look, guys, I know the kind of shit that Reeves has been through and I know a good amount of the work he's done for other people. Considering this was the 4th film he was performing in without a break and he was still basically a kid, I just can't criticize him too heavily. Maybe that makes me a crappy critic but it is what it is. His English accent in this movie is terrible though. The costuming is amazing, I honestly love it when filmmakers go all out like this (They did proper Victorian fashion for the time period and social class.  I was impressed.). The armor Dracula wears at the beginning is distinctive and sinister enough that you could have used it for a villain in a medieval film and people would have loved it. The Victorian costumes are detailed and signal the kind of characters we're dealing with. The cinematography is a damn dream to behold, the sets are beautiful and move from the nightmarish in tone to solid and safe and to the depths of fever dream as needed by the film. The only problem I have here is that the writing is, honestly kind of lackluster to terrible in quality. I mean the dialogue is well done enough but considering how many lines they lift from the novel completely or borrow from earlier Dracula films (much as I like Oldman's performance, I think Bela delivered the line about never drinking wine a lot better {Oh Yes, absolutely!}) I would argue that the dialogue was the easy part, it was half-written back in 1897! The biggest problem is the plot which is all over the place. Things are brought up, like Dracula buying a number of houses in London and then just dropped. Relationships are suggested like Renfield being the first solicitor sent to Dracula only to go mad. Now if you're John Harker locked in battle against a creature of the night wouldn't it make sense to find his earlier victim and see if you could maybe get some information out of him that would help? Apparently not! Mina's reaction to her “Dark Prince” murdering her best friend? Is basically a shrug and a meh! Which brings me to the dark heart of the problem in my eyes. The romance between Mina and Dracula is frankly something that works better in the Mummy movies (preferably starring Brendan Fraser, come at me Cruise fans!). Now I'll admit the change from brutal assault to forbidden romance is not an invention of this movie but it sticks out because besides this plotline the movie is actually pretty damn faithful to the novel. Vastly more than your average Dracula film. So we end up with a romance that pushes out the rest of the plot and in my view at least diminishes Mina. She goes from a woman who knows exactly what she wants and is a driving force in the plot, to someone who stands on the sidelines for most of it wringing her hands not sure who to support. Instead of being the brains of the outfit, she's sighing over her best friend's murderer and the guy who abused her husband so heavily that his hair turned white (Yeah, this just… it’s problematic in a lot of ways.  Maybe it was okay at first until Lucy died and then she shakes free of the shackles and goes after his head only to be turned anyway?  Or have it be very clear she was being psychically dominated?). Instead of being the one who pointed out that she could be used to divine the Count's movements, she's forced by Helsing to give that information. All these changes make her more passive than she was in a bloody Victorian novel!

So I honestly feel that how you feel about this movie is going to turn on how you feel about the romance plot specifically and the romanticizing of vampires in general. I hate it. Utterly. So it brings down Bram Stoker's Dracula to a C for me as a stand-alone. I would love to grade it higher but the fact is Coppola made the romance plot a pretty big part of the movie so the fact that it still gets a C from me is a testament to the sheer work the actors, customers, and stagehands put in (I’d give it a B, Garvin hates the vampire romance thing in general. {I do, but I do admit it can work in specific circumstances like a new vampire struggling with his new predatory nature for example} I think it can work.  So while I hate the application here, I don’t hate it generally.). As an adaptation, it's actually better than the standard Dracula movie and if you cut out the romance plot, it would actually be pretty close to perfect. So considering that I'm grading on a curve, I suppose it gets a C+ as an adaptation. I imagine that my opposition to the romance plot is going to be unpopular so I encourage y'all to post your own thoughts, defenses, and explanations in the comments or join us on the patron to tell me I'm insane.

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Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders