Bram Stoker's Dracula: The first time I saw it in the theatre, I loved it, thought it enormously sensuous and engaging. The second time I saw it, I hated it, thought it overblown, fatally lacking in subtlety and really embarrassing in parts. The third time I saw it, I loved it. Et cetera.
I've watched it enough now to know what to expect: a sort of Dark Theatre of Kabuki Histrionics, and I really love it. Coppola has taken the essence of Dracula, stayed reasonably true to an admittedly flawed book, while transforming the Count into a Romantic hero and the story itself into a Gothic love story. (Gothic love stories always end in death for someone.) Gary Oldman in the lead and Tom Waits as his Renfield handle the Kabuki aspects extraordinarily well (Waits' performance, albeit a minor one, is sheer genius). Anthony Hopkins (Van Helsing) we all know loves galloping over the top in performance in bold and sometimes hamfisted ways, and Richard E. Grant finds new ground with his morphine-addicted, love-addled Dr. Seward. Keanu Reeves is an easy mark for critics, with his less than satisfactory English accent (Winona Ryder's goes in and out, as does her performance, veering from lovely moments to the truly awful), but, perhaps from self-knowledge, Reeves avoids the hysterical almost entirely, choosing to stick within the bounds of the staid and stoical English bank-clerk.
Still, there's a thing Coppola does very well: he smooths over the rough edges of the acting with editing. In fact, the whole thing is so sensuously lit, photographed, and edited (and the sound, too,--wonderfully sensuous sound design) that it all flows together like a morphine dream. The minute details are marvellous: the Transylvanian mountains are filled with rings of blue flame, shadows move independently of their originals, rats as well as Dracula himself defy gravity by crawling upside-down. The Freudian aspects are not neglected, quite the contrary: witness the lustful glint in the eye of Lucy's fiance (Cary Elwes, quite good in an understated role), for instance, before he pounds the stake into her heart.
Another thing it captures and communicates extraordinarily well is that sensual hyperventilation girls experience when just about to embark on their sex lives.
It's another bold endeavour from Coppola, and, for my money, a crazed and original success, and it has a place high on my list of Top Ten Vampire Films. (Yes, I really do have such a list.)
SPOILER ALERT
Twixt: Remember that Johnny Depp movie, Secret Window? No reason you should. How about that Charlotte Rampling movie (sorry, film), the Swimming Pool? Again, no reason you should, except that it had as I recall a little of the steamy Gallic thing going on which might have stuck with you. These are films which belong to the "I don't know what I'm going to write about, so I'll write about a writer with writers' block and how it all comes out swimmingly in the end" genre, an inexcusable genre, absolutely the worst of the worst. A big, blatant cheat in every respect. (*)
This is one of those. The script is about as good (and by that I mean just mediocre enough to keep you sitting in your chair) as that of Secret Window, and although Coppola provides some interesting (and random, and pretentious) visuals, nobody's going to call this one a success. Part of the failure is due, I think, to the very groundedness of Val Kilmer, so practical and earthy and drolly mischievous that it seems impossible to project him into a fantastical realm. (OK, I haven't seen Willow. There are reasons for that.)
It tries to occupy that rarefied air of the Night Sea-Journey, a very select and difficult genre which includes the Machinist and Jacob's Ladder, works which travel back and forth between levels of dream and reality and (when such a story is successful, which is seldom) you're unsure which is which until it's made clear in the end. It's hard as hell to pull off well, few do it, and this one doesn't come close.
The best things about it are Tom Waits' opening narration (what a creepy and lovable treasure that man is) and Ben Chaplin's Edgar Allen Poe, convincing in spite of the script. Outside of those guys, we have a smattering of poor-man's Twin Peaks (quality along the lines of, say, Wolf Lake), with your typical small town enshrouded by an age-old tragedy (religious man abuses then dishes out the laced koolaid to a bunch of kids in an ill-conceived attempt to save them from becoming vampires), a town where all time happens at once: as the clock tower with seven faces indicates that it's seven different hours simultaneously, the action flows between the fifties, the late 1800s, and modern day, not so much seamlessly as without seeming to care whether or not we buy it.
It doesn't matter, really. You won't care. You have characters like a moon-bathing, Baudelaire-quoting Goth-King who runs a decades-, possibly centuries-old, gypsy-camp for Siouxsie Sioux wannabes across the river and who may or may not be a vampire. He reminded me of characters I found compelling when I was fourteen. In the end, there are sufficient enjoyable set-pieces (eccentric old sheriff Bruce Dern plying the Ouija Board, braces snapping off the teeth of a revivified little-girl vampire as she prepares her bite, a contrived piece of Lynchiana when Kilmer's writer finds the boarded-up hotel open for business and has a faux-Peaksian exchange with the keeper of the clock-tower and his folk-singing, vampire-hating wife. Ridiculous, but you can relax into it) to keep you watching.
(*) My boyfriend points out that 7 Psychopaths must belong to this genre, as it shares the subject matter, but that one escapes the label of Liar and Cheat because it plays straight with us about what is fiction and what is not.
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