The courtship of Mr Dracula

I don't know Francis Ford Coppola, obviously. But Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) suggests something about the director behind the project: namely that, stung by the middling reviews and accusations of cash-grab filmmaking that dogged him in the wake of The Godfather Part III, Coppola decided to make the most spectacular, overtly 'artistic' picture he could. And if the result was a film that would inspire devotion from some and bile from others, so much the better, for no-one could accuse him of playing it safe for guaranteed box-office returns.

Obviously, that may just be a fiction. But it would explain some of the eccentricities in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a film so chock-full of odd choices that it barely resembles a coherent narrative at all. An undead love story invented from scratch, perching precariously atop an almost slavishly orthodox retelling of Stoker's novel; milquetoast, bland performances right next to unfettered scenery-chewing; out-there visuals that never cohere as an aesthetic - Dracula has it all, and then some. It's a film of a thousand ideas, many of them clashing with each other in what could not possibly be classified as a success, but rather an endlessly watchable, legitimately fascinating failure.

The plot: in the fifteenth century, Prince Vlad of Wallachia (Gary Oldman) fights the invading Ottoman Empire. While he is gone, his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) receives a false report of his death and kills herself in despair. Overcome with rage and grief upon his return, Vlad curses God, drives out his priests and becomes an immortal bloodsucking fiend.

In 1897, Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) travels to Transylvania to seal a real estate deal with Count Dracula (Oldman). Arriving at Castle Dracula after an unsettling journey, he soon finds the count a strange host: besides being the only person Harker ever sees, Dracula also appears oddly obsessed with blood and medieval history and nurses a worrying hatred of mirrors. Harker soon realises that he has become the count's prisoner. His purchase of Carfax Abbey in London completed, Dracula departs the castle for England...

... where the psychiatrist Dr Jack Seward (Richard E. Grant) is troubled by his patient Renfield (Tom Waits), who rambles about 'the master' and has taken to devouring spiders and small insects. Meanwhile, wealthy socialite Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost) has become engaged to Arthur Holmwood (Cary Elwes), despite also being courted by Seward and Holmwood's friend, Texan Quincey Morris (Billy Campbell). Lucy becomes ill after being found wandering outside at night by her friend, and fiancée to Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), who happens to look exactly like Elizabeta. Lucy's strange case leads Seward to consult his mentor Abraham van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins). Meanwhile Mina's seemingly chance acquaintance with a recently arrived Transylvanian prince turns into a mutual obsession...

There are too many Dracula adaptations out there to claim that Bram Stoker's Dracula is the most faithful of the lot, but it undoubtedly hews far, far closer to the text than other well-known film versions. The film does actually reproduce the whole of Stoker's novel from beginning to end, missing virtually none of its beats (and if this seems like nothing special for an adaptation, please consult the 1931 and 1958 films). In places this is faithfulness for faithfulness' sake: the character of Quincey Morris remains exactly as inessential as he is in the novel and could easily be merged with Arthur Holmwood, but Coppola chooses to keep him in there. The devotion to the source material extends to seemingly trivial details earlier versions saw fit to dispense with.

And yet! The narrative structure of the novel is presented pretty much unchanged, but the story is completely different. Where Stoker wrote a Gothic horror novel about a sworn group of men fighting the vampiric villain who targets 'their' virtuous women, Coppola's is a tale of irresistible love/lust between an immortal lover and the reincarnation of his true love. The novel is terrified of female sexuality (Lucy's attempts to attack Holmwood are one with her amorous advances, forcibly interrupted by Van Helsing in his dual role of vampire hunter and chaperone), but the film's Lucy acts downright shockingly liberated (to put it politely) to begin with. Meanwhile, the overtly physical love between Dracula and Mina does not bring the latter to perdition, but helps the former renounce evil.

Adopting the novel's structure but repudiating its reactionary ideas does not, to me, work particularly well: it  turns the film's heroes into fools for at least the film's third act, when they're supposedly racing against time to stop evil. It also forces Oldman to portray two totally different characters: a hammy centuries-old monster liberally quoting Bela Lugosi's performance in the role (literally: his line readings of "I am Dracula. Welcome to my home" and "... What music they make" blow Lugosi's right out of the water, besides being a lot of fun for the actor), and a sensitive romantic lead. Both are fairly compelling, but they're impossible to reconcile as a single figure.

That decision also amplifies the tendency of the other performances to feel like they're from totally different films: Keanu Reeves's bland presence is frequently criticised, but his is a thin straight man part in which he acquits himself reasonably, mind-bogglingly horrible 'English' accent aside; Grant's twitchy Seward, a theoretically rational scientist who runs a nightmarish Bedlam while addled on then-newfangled drugs; Hopkins's Van Helsing, insane on a level that's occasionally amusing but clashes so badly with the other performances that several scenes he's in just fall apart; Elwes, a little unsure if his performance is an homage to or a parody of Errol Flynn. Ryder is, I think, the standout: her accent, too, is weak, but she never ceases to be convincing as the story's heart.

The film's enormous problems with its tone extend to the visuals, which are proudly overblown and lush but incoherent, throwing around idea after idea just to see what sticks. Some are fantastic: Castle Dracula, looking like a sinister enthroned figure against the backdrop of the Carpathians; vampire Lucy in her gorgeous and terrible shroud; the count suddenly dissolving into a mass of rats. Others are much less successful (Dracula's costume and makeup in his initial appearance are strikingly different from the usual 'You'll know I'm a vampire because I wear a cape' interpretations, but they're somewhat awful on their own merits).

It all adds up to a film that has a thousand things on its mind: being an homage to earlier iterations of the material (Coppola quotes without restraint from the genre's classics); half-baked explorations of fin-de-siècle signifiers like the cinematograph and absinthe-fuelled decadence; a young-and-sexy updating of Dracula for the MTV generation; a visual playground for an undoubtedly creative team; occasional questionable forays into horror-comedy (there's a particularly tasteless cut - you'll know it when you see it) -

- and, somewhere in there, an honest-to-God vampire picture that disregards an ossified cinematic tradition around Dracula to arrive at a totally new look at the count. Coppola foregrounds the beastly, feral nature of Dracula, his menacing presence - tinged with temptation - outside civilisation's hall and its hearth-fire in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. It feels at times as if Coppola is adapting not Stoker, but a take Angela Carter might have devised on Dracula.The result is a film that's unlike any other bloodsucker film out there. Unfortunately, its extravagant ambition never coheres. It's not boring for a second but, alas, that doesn't mean it's any good.

The hard goodbye

In a fit of marketing genius, the powers that be decided to advertise Blue Valentine as 'a love story'. They're right. It's the story of a love: an account of Cindy and Dean meeting, striking up a relationship, having a baby and destroying their marriage beyond belief and hope. It is not, then, romantic in the usual sense, but neither am I prepared to call it nihilistic.

When we're introduced to Cindy (Michelle Williams), Dean (Ryan Gosling), it's pretty clear their marriage is on the rocks: during breakfast, Dean is goofing around with their daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyka) while Cindy does all the work, his childish behaviour a form of aggression against her by claiming Frankie. Later, Cindy finds the family dog dead after being hit by a car; Dean is unwilling to give her the comfort she needs, suggesting instead a night at a sleazy sex motel.

Blue Valentine goes back and forth between the present - just two days, in which the relationship suffers a final, catastrophic and irrevocable breakdown - and the story, over several months, of the beginnings of their love. Dean, working at a moving company, meets Cindy when she visits her grandmother at a retirement home, and she's eventually swayed by his happy-go-lucky ways.

Those chronologically early scenes are so much indie rom-com cliché, but of course there's a horrid twist. Watching the relationship blossom is gut-wrenching not just because we know it won't work out, but also because we realise that the very qualities that endear them to one another will end up tearing them apart. Both are recognisably the same people a few years later, but they're using their personalities - his ostentatious relaxed slackerdom, her controlled, anxious fretting - to attack each other.

Dean comes off as very much the worse of the two, not just because his romantic comedy antics cause trouble for Cindy, but because director Derek Cianfrance gives Gosling a number of traits that tend to scream 'bad guy', at least in the chronologically later portion of the picture: he's balding, wears wifebeaters and sunglasses, smokes, and is sliding into alcoholism. He seems responsible for most of their problems, his sense of inadequacy projected into aggressively twisting her words. Dean is, in a word, pretty much awful throughout.

Cianfrance's achievement lies in not making Blue Valentine a simple story of a long-suffering woman and her terrible husband. Thanks to the writing and Gosling's performance, Dean is never less than a complete human being, and so we empathise with him even in his worst moments: by pretending concern for Frankie's welfare, he instrumentalises their daughter to guilt-trip Cindy into staying with him, and it is despicable, but also pathetic - and I suppose quite a lot of people actually do this, which makes it sadder still.

The direction is increasingly inventive as the film moves along, using a lot of handheld camerawork for an unsettled aesthetic, and a number of shots that are cold, sad and brutal, but still beautiful: Cindy stepping over Dean, who's sleeping on the floor; or the two of them talking to each other through a window from an angle Cianfrance chooses to make sure we only see Cindy's reflection, so they seem not to be looking at each other.

As shot by Andrij Parekh, Blue Valentine looks exactly like old family photos - beautiful, sure, but it communicates visually that all this story is told in the past tense, doomed to an unhappy ending. The film's most heartbreaking scene is set in the back of a bus, when Dean ventures 'let's be a family' after the pregnant Cindy has decided not to have an abortion. It's a beginning, but it is also Janus-faced, pointing to that moment - inserted not soon after - when the family begun in tears and laughter falls apart forever.

Benefit fraud

For some reason 2011 turned out to be the year in which the pictures took on casual sex in earnest. That's fine, I suppose: 'friends with benefits' has become something of an issue in the public imagination, even though one suspects rather fewer people engage in it than are intrigued by the concept. But Hollywood is nothing if not conservative, and shackling edgy notions of casual sex and non-commitment to the rom-com formula means that the free-spirited 'friends' invariably discover that man was not meant to be this way, their trysts are very wrong, and salvation lies in heterosexual monogamy.*

Thus it was with the year's first 'friends with benefits' feature, the barbarically traditional No Strings Attached. There, the lack of chemistry between Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman made casual sex look deeply unappealing. So I'm glad to pronounce that Justin Timberlake and Portman's fellow Black Swan alumnus Mila Kunis do a much better job in Friends with Benefits.**

Justin Timberlake plays Dylan, a Person of Uncertain Job Description who is headhunted by Jamie (Mila Kunis) to take up a Position of Great Vagueness at GQ in New York. Jamie sells New York on sheer breezy charm, and the two soon become good friends - until, inevitably, they decide to sample the joys of casual sex together. That works well for a while, to the amusement of Jamie's promiscuous mother (Patricia Clarkson) and Dylan's hyper-masculine gay colleague Tommy (Woody Harrelson). Eventually Dylan invites Jamie to visit his family on the west coast, where their friendship is severely tested, leading to much angst.

They reconcile eventually. (Spoiler!) It's that sort of film. But for a long time it looks like it won't be: for its first hour Friends with Benefits is on fire, funny and fresh and, yes, sexy. Kunis and Timberlake have great chemistry, and they've proved their acting skills in Black Swan and The Social Network, respectively. Beautiful young people - oh, and how beautiful they are! - having fun together is quite infectious, and its sheer charm carries the film much of the way. Not to mention that the comic material is crisp, both the raunchy and the more traditional stuff; a recurring gag around Dylan's scepticism towards the 'miracle on the Hudson' gets funnier each time.

It's during the film's second hour that problems begin to crop up. The visit to Dylan's family - including his single-parent sister and a father suffering from Alzheimer's - marks the film's transition from light, breezy comedy to melodrama. It's not a mood that suits the film at all well, and it hardly helps that virtually all the comedy falls on one side of the divide. Nor do I find it believable that Friends with Benefits suddenly wants to provide serious commentary on family, friendships and relationships when the world the characters inhabit is so fantastic: as usual in romantic comedies, everybody is exceedingly well-off and enjoys a one hour work week.

In fact, characters are a bit of a problem for a film: Dylan is much more fleshed out than Jamie, but neither is particularly detailed. Supporting characters are even sketchier: like most rom-com friends Woody Harrelson exists mostly so Dylan has someone to talk to, although at least he has his one-note 'He's gay, but he's a jock! Teh funny!' comic persona. Harrelson carries it off, of course, for he is Woody Harrelson. Patricia Clarkson's character is similarly ill-defined and peripheral, and Bryan Greenberg is saddled with the thankless job of providing a one-dimensional foil to Dylan who is introduced, wreaks havoc, and is forgotten.

But I can't be angry with a film that struggles so mightily against rom-com tropes, even if it is all in vain: where No Strings Attached moved ahead mercilessly on its rails from Meet Cute to True Love, Friends with Benefits makes it clear that the characters are primarily concerned about their friendship, which is not merely treated as a transitional stage to romance. The acknowledgment that life isn't solely defined by the search for the right partner makes Friends with Benefits more interesting than your average cookie cutter chick flick, and helps it transcend its clichéd trappings even if ultimately it cannot escape them. 

*Which I have no problem with: heterosexual monogamy doesn't get enough love. The problem is that foreordained endings are boring, and if the notion of 'friends with benefits' is morally unacceptable, it at least has the advantage of not being promoted by every Hollywood film ever.
**Incidentally, Black Swan was surely one of the least sexy films ever made. I don't think Aronofsky has ever portrayed a mutually fulfilling, non-exploitative sexual relationship on screen.

Headin' nowhere

(Note: much of the historical context, and some of the analysis, is drawn from two sources: Bonnie and Clyde by Lester D. Friedman and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, edited by Friedman, who seems quite the expert on the film. I won’t reference rigorously, this not being an academic essay – just note that I’ve stolen much of the material.)

The ‘New American Cinema’ (c. 1967-1981) was without doubt the richest period of Hollywood. Easy Rider, The Godfather and its sequel, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Badlands, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, A Clockwork Orange, Annie Hall… That’s just a few of the most important films of that magical decade-and-a-half when new filmmakers revolutionised cinema. They were auteurs, fiercely protective of their individual visions, but by common consent they had one thing in common: they were unleashed by Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was created first and foremost by the passion of four men: first-time screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton, producer and leading man Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn. Beatty wanted to gain more independence within the studio system, while Penn was eager to realise his vision of a film inspired by the New Wave that was then in full bloom in France. Indeed both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were in talks to direct the film: while Truffaut made some very specific suggestions that survived in the final product (such as the high angles during car chases), Godard wanted to make the film resolutely his own and set it in the modern day. But Penn won the day, and being no Godard can be a good thing: while still an auteur, he did not insist on being so idiosyncratic and, frankly, difficult. So, like it or not, Bonnie and Clyde is far more accessible (‘easy’, I guess) than your average French film. It was a box-office flop on its limited release in October 1967, but the immediate critical controversy it spawned and the ten Oscar nominations received persuaded executives to re-release the film in early 1968, and the rest is history.

After an astonishingly effective opening montage of Depression-era photographs that begins in silence, the film proper starts with a close-up image of a woman’s mouth. She’s Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), and she spends this opening scene naked. Hollywood naked, you understand: it’s quite clear she is, but you don’t see anything. Still, that’s Penn telling you straight away that what you’re about to see will be taboo-breaking and exciting in all sorts of ways. From her bedroom window, Bonnie observes Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) trying to steal her mother’s car. This leads to him inviting her out for a drink, and when he tells her that he has just been released from jail after serving time for armed robbery, she not only suggestively strokes the gun he produces to show off (really, it’s very suggestive, and no-one in 1967 was in any way likely to mistake it), but also dares him to rob a shop for her. Which he does, and she is so excited by this that it takes little persuasion from Clyde to convince her to abandon her tedious existence as a waitress and follow him on a life of driving cool cars, taking what they need without asking, and being wildly in love. Not that the last part works as Bonnie hoped: in a major point of the film, Clyde turns out to be impotent, and the external violence leashed out mirrors the characters’ inner frustration.

Bonnie and Clyde is very clearly divided into three acts, each ending in violence: in the first part, the titular characters meet and set out on their life of crime. Their play-acting at being gangsters definitively ends when, during a bungled bank robbery, Clyde shoots a bank employee to make possible their escape. The second act chronicles the crime spree of the Barrow Gang, consisting beside Bonnie and Clyde of the latter’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck’s wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), who is drawn into the gang by accident and loyalty to her husband, and the simple-minded mechanic C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard). The Barrow Gang’s aimless life of robbing banks and stealing cars comes to an end when they are cornered by police in the film’s hardest-hitting gunfight. In the third act, Bonnie and Clyde are in hiding, hoping for a fresh start, but we know it is not to be.

If that sounds like I’ve just given away large parts of the plot, fear not: the fact that it will not all end happily is quite clear from early on. Clyde’s shooting of the bank employee is the point of no return: from there on, the lovers have blood on their hands and must atone for it in the end. Nor is their journey really represented as a romantic road trip, although it is clear that the characters would very much like to think they’re living wild and free outside societal restrictions. In her poem about their lives together, Bonnie frames their ‘adventure’ as a modern Robin Hood story. She recounts Clyde’s experience of being kept down by the Man: ‘Then he said to me, “I’ll never be free, so I’ll meet a few of them in hell”.’ But in an early attempted stick-up, Clyde is assaulted by the desperate shop owner, evidently unaware that he is robbing not the rich, but hard-working average Americans.

The obsession with image is one of the most pervasive themes of the film. It is no coincidence that Bonnie and Clyde begins with photographs and a reflection in a mirror while the very final frame of the movie is seen through a window. Bonnie in particular grasps the possibility the media afford. She constructs the image of the gang as dashing outlaws posing with guns and cigars by taking pictures with a captured policeman (Denver Pyle) and sending them to the newspapers. If Bonnie projects an image outwards, Clyde creates illusions within their relationship, cultivating hopes of a romantic life that will plainly not materialise. He tells Bonnie’s mother that when he and Bonnie settle down, they will live no more than three miles from her. ‘You try to live three miles from me and you won’t live long, honey’, Mother Parker tells her daughter in one of the best scenes of the film. ‘You best keep running, Clyde Barrow. And you know it.’

This rejection at his lover’s hands reveals Clyde’s weakness. From the first, he is not in the dominant position in the relationship a Hollywood lead might be expected to be in. He commits the first robbery of the film in his desperation to impress Bonnie and is visibly the more nervous of the two in their early crimes. Bonnie, the clear protagonist in the film’s first act before fading somewhat in the second, takes easily and naturally to a life that liberates her from the cage she knew before. Where Clyde is inarticulate, insecure (constantly driven by the need to impress his girlfriend and keep up with his older brother) and fails in the bedroom, she is vocal, confident and sexually voracious. Indeed, it is difficult to resist the early impression that she is something of a hellcat, a temptress leading weak-willed Clyde down the path of iniquity. That this is not so becomes clear when the rigours of their run from law enforcement reveal Bonnie’s frailty.

If I’ve now made the film doom-laden and laborious, I’ve given you a very wrong impression. For starters, the entire thing is hilarious. Penn switches between action, comedy and tragedy very quickly. One of Clyde’s early attempts at bank robbery fails when the bank he has chosen is revealed to be abandoned, whereupon he drags the sole remaining cashier outside to explain the situation to Bonnie for fear of embarrassing himself: this is a good example of using humour to further the plot (in this case, showing Clyde’s insecurity). And if not for the humour, let’s face it: Bonnie and Clyde is also great at showing attractive young people posing with guns (which, wrong and reactionary though it may be, are decidedly awesome) and wearing fantastic fashion. Here’s what I mean:

Yeah. Faye Dunaway is decidedly central to the film not only in being absurdly well-dressed, but also in exuding sex appeal (no-one can drink a bottle of Coke like Bonnie Parker). Even if little is explicit, Dunaway is so sensual that it would be astonishing if every moral conservative in America hadn’t been appalled. This brings us to the major criticism the film received then: namely, the accusation that it romanticised violent crime. As I pointed out above, the reality is rather more complex than that, but there’s no denying that young people being in love and robbing banks are cool (unless it’s Malick’s Badlands). And of course the policemen gunned down along the way are more or less faceless goons. So the film has it both ways: it foregrounds the characters’ self-delusion while also letting the viewer feel their appeal.

I am as usual ill-equipped to discuss technical aspects, so let’s do it. Penn’s direction is self-consciously flashy: it works to draw attention to itself, but since it’s excellent, that’s all to the good. A character’s death is filmed with an unsteady zoom from a high angle, an unflinching eye on human suffering. In what is probably the film’s most famous scene, Penn uses rapid cutting to devastating effect. His filming of violence is almost nauseatingly visceral, far more real than what moviegoers in 1967 were used to. No accusation is more wrong-headed than that Penn made violence look glamorous. Instead, he made you feel it. At the height of the Vietnam War, that was a political statement, and one just as relevant today.

Bonnie and Clyde is a rich film. It bears endless scholarly dissection. But for the casual or not so casual viewer, it’s a visceral, innovative and, dare I say it, thoroughly entertaining experience centred on a couple of outstanding performances. Like Godard’s Weekend, Bonnie and Clyde has a sort of inbuilt negative dialectic: it constantly negates the meanings it seems to construct. It’s a cautionary tale about the follies of youth. Ah, but it’s so romantic! As for me, I’ll remember the tragedy and the violence. And Faye Dunaway sporting a beret.