BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
With Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Sadie Frost, Tom Waits, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Bill Campbell.
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Consider that major European academics such as Umberto Eco and the late Roland Barthes have written about movies for popular newspapers and magazines, but their U.S. counterparts are considered much too esoteric for such exposure–which doesn’t mean that American readers are dumber, only that American editors (and perhaps writers) are more restrictive. Or consider that European TV stations think nothing of routinely programming series devoted to key Hollywood directors such as Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger, and Douglas Sirk, but the very idea of Cinemax or the Movie Channel or American Movie Classics making such a highbrow gesture more than once in a blue moon would send shock waves through the industry. (I can’t imagine it bothering viewers; European TV watchers certainly haven’t been bothered, which is why these directors are much better known over there than here.) Similarly, when TV channels abroad show ‘Scope films in their original formats, a process known as letterboxing, the reasons are usually artistic. Here, the selection by cable channels of what to letterbox seems almost totally arbitrary (Pillow Talk but not The Tarnished Angels, for instance); this Sunday TNT is presenting a whole day of letterboxed movies, but the titles selected suggest that artistic considerations had little or nothing to do with the choices. Finally, while English movie reviewers on TV and in national newspapers periodically acknowledge the existence of academic film theory–almost exclusively, I should add, in order to jeer at it–here the possibility of it even being attacked in the national press seems well beyond the pale.
These reflections are inspired in part by some curious critical responses to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by far Francis Coppola’s most European-influenced movie to date. These responses testify to the fact that we still have two autonomous film cultures that are barely on speaking terms. (As someone who has often tried to work in both worlds and occasionally served as an interpreter between them, I would add that the noncommunication goes both ways; some film professors are every bit as indifferent to the industry and to mainstream critics as these critics and the industry are to them.)
(1) Several alternating narrators, creating a somewhat dispersed narrative that eventually comes together only in relation to the love story (see number ten below).
(6) Many fancy and often lovely superimpositions and various baroque visual transitions drawn from silent movies.
Of course it’s all too much–which makes one wonder why some reviewers are implying it isn’t nearly enough. One reason is that “too much” can be read as a symptom of too little when it comes to ideas. (The references to The Golden Bough and “The Hollow Men” in the pretentious final sequence of Apocalypse Now suggest, among other things, that Coppola was stuck for an ending.) Another is that an unwanted busyness and complexity can easily produce boredom, a lazy refusal to participate in the various games a screenwriter and director are proposing.
