Here's a question from the
Cultural Aptitude Test. Warren Spahn is
to Casey Stengel as Tom Waits is to
........??? Warren Spahn pitched for
Casey Stengel in the 1940's for some
woeful Boston Braves teams in the years
before Mathews and Aaron showed up. He
also pitched for Casey in the 1960's for
some woeful Mets teams in the days before
Tom Seaver showed up. In between, from
1949 to 1960, Casey won ten pennants in
twelve years, including five consecutive
World Series. Spahnie was fond of
pointing out that he was the only man who
worked for Casey before and after he was
a genius. My analogy doesn't work
perfectly for Tom Waits and Francis Ford
Coppola, because the chronology is off.
Waits never worked in Coppola's
pre-Godfather movies, but he worked in
some when Coppola's genius seemed to be
in remission. Most glaringly, he was
Renfield in Dracula.
What a disappointment it must
have been for Coppola to read the reviews
of this movie. He was a certified genius,
he got enough money to make a comeback
big-budget movie, and this is what he
churned out. Don't think the movie is
without value. If you nominated this as
the most visually splendid movie in your
knowledge, you'd have a good case. The
recreations of Gothic Transylvania and
Gaslit Victorian London are splendid -
sometimes beautiful, sometimes chilling.
The first five minutes of the movie are
just brilliant. But what possessed
Coppola to cast this cast?
First there is Dracula. We
need the most over-the-top actor in the
business. Shatner is too old and fat, and
Larry Storch is too silly - how about
Gary Oldman? His fag-hag movements and
monologues are so exaggerated and campy
as to make Burt Ward look like a master
of subtlety. I laughed out loud twice
when I watched the tape, when he took
Keanu's shaving razor and licked the
blood off of it, and when he was doing
that hand thing while talking to his
wives. Tom Waits, the skid row Sinatra,
matches Oldman measure for measure, an
overacting symphony unmatched since
Shatner himself went toe-to-toe with
Montalban in The Wrath of Khan. The rest
of the cast is equally uncomfortable.
Keanu Reeves is Harker, the brilliant
young London attorney. OK, let's pause on
that one. You want to cast an actor who
can be convincing as a brilliant young
19th century attorney, and you want him
to speak with an aristocratic accent from
Victorian London? Who would you hire?
I'll bet not one of you out there would
have been stupid enough to hire Keanu
Reeves, but that's exactly who the genius
Coppola came up with. Cary Elwes was
right there on the set, in the cast in a
minor part, and could easily have handled
Harker in a workmanlike and professional
way, but no-o-o-o-o, get me Keanu. Whoa,
bitchin', vampire dude! It was like Joe
Don Baker playing Hamlet. And what was
the deal with that Cowboy guy? "Now
jes' hold on there, Dracula, you orn'rey
sidewindin' bloodsuckin' whippersnapper,
or I'll blast ya to kingdom come,
buccaroo".
The movie is worse if you
watch it again, because you realize how
badly it was truncated. For example, they
must have planned a plot element about
why Dracula wanted to buy such specific
pieces of land in London - they discussed
the logic - then dropped the thread and
never picked it up again. There are even
continuity errors. Keanu's hair was
supposed to gray as the movie progressed,
until he was completely free of the
vampire's power, I guess. Or maybe it got
lighter as he got nearer to Vampy.
Unfortunately, it would get lighter in
one scene, then darker, then lighter
again without logic. Keanu's accent, such
as it was, followed the same course.
Sometimes the hair changes color in the
same scene with different camera angles.
No excuse for that. I guess scenes were
re-edited from the planned sequence, or
maybe they just plain lost track of the
details. They simply dropped Renfield at
one point, for example, and forgot about
him. You know what happened, don't you?
It was the emperor's new clothes.
Hundreds of smart people involved in the
movie knew the parts that sucked and
exactly why, but nobody had the balls to
look the great genius in the eye and say
so. Who could presume to question the guy
who did "Apocalypse Now"? Same
thing happened to Tarkovsky when he made
"Nostalghia".
The plot centers around
Dracula's search for the reincarnation of
his centuries-ago true love. Of course,
he was looking a little better back in
the 1400's, when she committed suicide,
thinking him dead. A sweet love story
amid the Gothic wreckage? Phantom of the
Soap Opera? Well, I suppose Winona isn't
going to get a lot of action from Keanu
Reeves, so why not take on Drac? Say,
maybe that explains why they cast Keanu.
The movie won the great
genius three statuettes, for things like
make up and costumes and sound effects.
Talk about damning with faint praise. How
many sleepless nights have you passed
wondering who would win the Oscar for
best Sound Effects Editing? It didn't win
any f/x awards, and I'm not surprised,
All the castles and mountains were
painted backdrops, and obviously so. It
is easy to fall in love with digitized
images, as we all know.
I could have forgiven the
comic opera acting and the painted frames
because of the movie's strengths, except
that the movie has one unforgiveable
element. It is boring. Tedious. Seems
infinitely long. Stylish, but not scary.
In the entertainment field, boredom is
the only true sin. I loved the first 15
minutes, especially the symbolic and
minimalist scenes from the 15th century,
then I had to fight off sleep except
during the unintentionally comic
interludes. My friend Count Floyd sent
over these tips for you youngsters who
want to make scary monster chiller horror
films (1) Speeches aren't scary, unless
Ted Kennedy makes them and they use a lot
of close-ups. (2) Monsters that can be
clearly seen and defined aren't scary.
People fear the unknown, the unseen, the
shadowy, the unexplained. When you show
things too clearly, they start to seem
familiar, or comical, or trite. Oldman's
haircut might have been scary if kept in
shadow, but when you see it, well it's
just silly and perplexing.