Back in London, we meet other principals, including the fearless vampire killer Prof. Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), and Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), a free spirit who has three suitors and is Mina's best friend. When Dracula appears in town, Van Helsing's antenna start to quiver. And the movie descends into an orgy of visual decadence, in which what people do is not nearly as degraded as how they look while they do it.
Coppola directs with all the stops out, and the actors perform as if afraid they will not be audible in the other theaters of the multiplex. The sets are grand opera run riot - Gothic extravaganza intercut with the Victorian London of gaslights and fogbound streets, rogues in top hats and bad girls in bustiers. Keanu Reeves, as a serious young man of the future, hardly knows what he's up against with Count Dracula, and neither do we, since Dracula cheerfully changes form - from an ancient wreck to a presentable young man to a cat and a bat and a wolf.
Vampire movies, which run in the face of all scientific logic, are always heavily laden with pseudo-science. Hopkins lectures learnedly on the nosferatu, yet himself seems capable of teleportation and other tricks not in the physics books. And the Ryder character finds herself falling under the terrible spell of the vampire's need. Many women are flattered when a man says he has been waiting all of his life for them. But if he has been waiting four centuries? The one thing the movie lacks is headlong narrative energy and coherence. There is no story we can follow well enough to care about.
There is a chronology of events, as the characters travel back and forth from London to Transylvania, and rendezvous in bedrooms and graveyards. But Coppola seems more concerned with spectacle and set-pieces than with storytelling; the movie is particularly operatic in the way it prefers climaxes to continuity.
Faced with narrative confusions and dead ends (why does Dracula want to buy those London properties in such specific locations?), I enjoyed the movie simply for the way it looked and felt. Production designers Dante Ferreti and Thomas Sanders have outdone themselves. The cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, gets into the spirit so completely be always seems to light with shadows.
Oldman and Ryder and Hopkins pant with eagerness. The movie is an exercise in feverish excess, and for that if for little else, I enjoyed it.
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