BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA - Blu-ray review

If I didn't know that Francis Ford Coppola directed this film, I wouldn't have learned it from watching. Coppola goes ballistically Gothic, celebrating all of the excess that made Gothic novels and novellas so popular: the gaudily opulent lifestyles, the upper-class romances in chivalric tradition, the horrors and mysteries lurking behind every column and curtain, and an atmosphere that writers such as Edgar Allan Poe deliberately manipulated to raise every suspicion and every hair on a person's body. Many of the scenes in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" have a Bacchanalian feel, with a golden tint washing over them, especially the orgiastic scenes-and we're speaking literally here, folks. There's nudity which seems writhingly gratuitous unless you consider that the name of the game here seems to be creating an atmosphere of, as I said, Gothic excess.

Under Coppola's direction, Gary Oldman plays Vlad the Impaler (slash) Count Dracula with a melodramatic flair so worthy of silent movies that you half expect eerie organ music to crescendo every time he gesticulates wildly. The problem I had with his performance, and the tone of the entire production, for that matter, was that I was never really sure whether "Bram Stoker's Dracula" was intentionally campy or unintentionally so. I mean, I thought it was so over-the-top that it was tongue-in-cheek funny, but did Coppola and the others know it when they were making the film, or were they trying for a strict but serious Gothic interpretation?

Well, those questions were answered when I looked at the latest version of Coppola's film, "Bram Stoker's Dracula" Collector's Edition in Blu-ray. I hadn't seen the bonus features on the Collector's Edition before this disc, and so I found everything that Coppola had to say about the film positively brilliant. The man is clearly a genius, and the more he explained the more I began to appreciate what he was doing. Now, "like" and "appreciate" are two different things, but I have to admit that the combination of Coppola's passionate and heady remarks and the better-than-ever look of the film on Blu-ray was enough to make my whole viewing experience more enjoyable.

The action opens with a flashback that shows Vlad the Impaler leaving his Transylvanian castle to fight faraway in the Crusades. He returns to find that his beloved wife, thinking him dead, had hurled herself off the castle walls to her death. Not surprisingly, Vlad turns against the church that he fought for and curses God, vowing to embrace the dark forces. Blood gushes from the cross he stabs and other inanimate objects in true Gothic fashion, and then it's a quick cut from 1462 to 1897 London. We're introduced to Keanu Reeves, who plays a bank attorney sent to Count Dracula to broker a real estate transaction that's never quite clear. What is clear, though, is that the agent he's replacing isn't well at all. In fact, he's gone quite mad. Something happened to him at that castle, but Reeves forges ahead anyhow.

What he finds when he gets to the castle is a grotesque (another Gothic tradition) old man reminiscent of the emperor in "Star Wars" who insists, with a capital "I," that Jonathan Harker remain for quite some time. Harker is engaged to Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), but things get complicated when the Count/Vlad sees in her the spitting image of his dearly departed Elisabeta (also Ryder, in the opening Crusades-era sequence) whom he has been waiting for in that castle all these years in hopes of being reunited with her. So he detains Harker and heads for London in search of his beloved. Of course Prof. Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) senses Dracula's presence and gets into the act as things get weirder and weirder, and Mina's friend, Lucy (Sadie Frost) gets Draculized while all her friends try to put this to an end, and we're left wondering whether Mina will end up a Vampire Queen or any other number of options.

Overall, though, I found the plot disappointingly familiar and the performances good but not great-which put the burden of my response to the film on the Gothic characters and the stylish atmosphere that Coppola cultivated. Those who are more approving of the film's excesses will respond to the movie's tone more positively, but I felt that it was caught, like Dracula himself, somewhere between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Here's where the bonus features gave the picture a boost, though. It's interesting to hear how Coppola wanted to produce a vampire picture that was true to Bram Stoker's novel about the Count, and how he also wanted a visual style that took risks--so much so that he fired three people and hired his 21-year-old son for the job. And you know what happens when you take risks: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Listen to Coppola talk about how they decided to use old-time Hollywood tricks to achieve the visual effects and you begin to realize that this wasn't just a homage to Bram Stoker's "Dracula." It was also his homage to Hollywood's golden era of moviemaking.

And it looks better on Blu-ray than it ever has.

Video:
This has always been a slightly grainy film, by Coppola's design, apparently. Along with the mist and the haze it's a device that helps plunge viewers into the deep end of the vampire pool. But when you see one particular scene in the film--a visual segue where peacock feathers appear in close-up and fan across the screen--you see the kind of clarity we've all grown used to with the new HD technology. It really pops out at you, the detail is so astounding. The whole film isn't that way, though, and again it's for effect. It's just not one of those you're going to pop in to wow people with your new Blu-ray system. "Bram Stoker's Dracula" is presented in 1080p High Definition (1.85:1 aspect ratio).

Audio:
The featured audio is an English PCM 5.1 uncompressed track that has the rich fullness of an organ playing the kind of Gothic tunes that feed flicks like this. The bass is resonant and there's good spread across the center and front main speakers. Additional sound options are English, Hungarian, French, Czech Dolby Digital 5.1, Polish VO 5.1, and Russian 4.0, with scads of subtitles: English, English SDH, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Skpanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Romanian, Icelandic, Bulgarian.

Extras:
The bonus features from the Collector's Edition DVD are repeated here: more than 30 minutes of deleted scenes, a number of them featuring Tom Waits as R.M. Renfield, Dracula's manservant. There's also a trailer, but the real treats are the documentaries, Coppola's substantial introduction to the film, and Coppola's commentary track.

I could have listened to Coppola talk all day, and thankfully he's everywhere, even captured live in vintage clips that show him at work. The best of the documentaries was "The Blood is the Life: The Making of Dracula" which offered 28 minutes of behind-the-scenes narration. Here's where we see Coppola as a much-younger man directing traffic on the set, or in stills with his children. On "In-Camera: The Naïve Visual Effects of Dracula," son Roman Coppola appears now to talk about the old-fashioned movie tricks they used, and Coppola senior appears as he looks now. It's a fascinating 19 minutes that you'll wish was longer. Same with "Method and Madness: Visualizing Dracula" (12 minutes) and "The Costumes are the Sets: The Design of Eiko Ishioka" (14 minutes). The film won Oscars for costume design, make-up, and sound effects, so it's appropriate to have bonus features like this.

Too often, a director's "introduction" to a film is a tacked-on minute that says something simplistic: "I liked it and I hope you do too." But Coppola is all about substance, and his long introduction (playable with subtitles) is as good as the full commentary, which offers insight after insight and reinforces what he was trying to do in relation to Stoker's novel. It's one of the best commentaries I've listened to.

Bottom Line:
The bonus features on this disc made me more appreciative of what Coppola was doing, but I still can't say that I find "Bram Stoker's Dracula" as successful as my colleague John J. Puccio expressed in his laudatory review. It all boils down to this: how do you like your Gothic excess?