Posts Tagged: Dracula
Nosferatu lives. And we watched it.
We Finally Watch it.
As some of you know, my daughter and grandson have been living with us for, well, a while, now. And this has been fun and hectic and rewarding and so on, but it has also meant that we are not likely to tune in something terrifying when he’s here. As a result, we had not watched Nosferatu yet, despite knowing it was going to be a wild ride. But he is with his dad this weekend, and my daughter is off being young, so we decided to sit down and watch the extended cut (it’s four minutes longer, folks) of Nosferatu.
My experience with Eggers films is mixed. I really enjoyed The Witch (well is enjoy the right word for something terrifying?). I stopped watching The Lighthouse (life is too short). We saw The Northman in the theater and I was busting out laughing by the end of it, because it does feature two naked barbarians battling it out with broadswords on a live volcano. Eggers doesn’t hold back.
So we turned out the lights and tuned in.
The movie begins with Lily Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, entreating the screen for some love and tenderness, only to be answered by the creepy voice of Nosferatu. Then, it goes on from there with a plot that is very familiar to readers and watchers of any Dracula story, because Nosferatu was a rewriting of Dracula for the purposes of making a movie without Bram Stoker’s permission. You have all the same characters with minor changes, and it takes place in Germany.
This creates two problems; one, none of the actors can do a credible German accent, and two, there is no sea passage between Germany and Transylvania. The accents, feh, who cares. The sea passage is much more crucial to the plot, so the Jonathon Harker character arrives to the castle after a journey on horseback, but then the count arrives to Germany via a ghost ship.
I’m not sure how many of you have read Dracula, but it’s a wildly uneven book with incredibly dull parts, like, unforgivably dull, and it is also an assembled text, composed of standard storytelling, all kinds of journal entries, news items, long monologs written in accented speech, and so forth. The best way to read it is with a free substack called Dracula Daily, and by the way that starts fresh in two weeks so sign up now! (no ad here, just, it’s such a cool way to read a difficult book).
Back to the movie.
If you’ve seen the play version of Wicked, you probably appreciated how the playwright combined elements of the original Baum book, the 1939 movie, the novel, and the entirely new musical. This version of Nosferatu does something similar. The parallels to Dracula are part of it, of course, since its stolen in the first place. But there are MANY parallels to the original Nosferatu movie, including long shots of Max Schrek-inspired finger shadows. And I saw copious nods to Coppola’s Dracula.
All of this is to say, this movie is a labor of love, an homage, a masterwork, and not nearly as good as I’d hoped it would be. Some of it is the lauded camera work. It seems that every shot is set up for maximum impact and maximum Wes-Anderson-but-filthy-symmetry. That sounds good, yes? But the constant center framing of all the action lets you know that Something. Important. Happens. You lose the sense of a story unfolding, of action or story, and start to see one masterfully framed painting of horror after another. Here it COMES. Dead CENTER. Right in the MIDDLE. And so on.
Sets and costumes are gorgeous and perfect. There is no sense of Fake London, like in the Coppola movie. Our German village is perfectly created.
So let’s talk about the acting.
The acting in this is about a hundred times better than in the Coppola Dracula. Lily Rose Depp is fascinating. You can’t take your eyes off her when she’s onscreen, whether she’s pining for her lost husband or having a sexually-tinged seizure or behaving indecently under the sway of Count Orlok. She’s convincing up to and including her last moment, which is both tender and profane.
Everyone else is good to excellent. Willem Defoe as the alchemist who is a ripoff of Van Helsing takes large bites of the scenery and chews them with great gusto. My husband remarked, “Defoe really commits, doesn’t he?” and we cracked up. But when Defoe is framed up in a crumbling architectural element and waving his hands madly, it’s all a little much. I’m sure he had fun. But were we supposed to be laughing?
The Renfield-type character can’t even touch Tom Waits’ Renfield. He tries, he runs around bloody and naked and insane, but he’s just the requisite crazy guy waiting for his master to arrive. I don’t know how Waits did what he did in the Coppola mess but that was one helluva performance and all other Renfields will be judge by his uber-Renfield.
And the Undead Himself.
Well, then, let’s get to the Skarsgaard Orlock. You know, it’s fine to bury a gorgeous man under a bunch of ugliness. Eggers managed to do that to this actor’s brother (I think they are brothers) in The Northman by making Hamlet (yes, The Northman is a retelling of Hamlet) savage and dirty and brutal and dumb. But he was still nice to look at.
In this movie, this other Skaarsgard’s Orlok is huge, menacing, and in advanced state of decay. I do wish Eggers would have taken a note from the Coppola Dracula and cleaned up his Orlok a bit, transformed him into a seductive dandy once he left the castle. But he stays just as grotesque and decayed. And the note that Eggers did import–the horrible, gargled, marbles-in-his-mouth Dracula diction–that is well and firmly in place, but with the addition of a strangled wheeze, as if Orlok were a three-pack-a-day smoker ending his life with galloping emphysema.
It is almost impossible to make out what he is saying, but that’s okay because it’s just a bunch of evil commanding crap. You will obey me! Silence, slave! And so on. The “extended cut” turns out to be mostly a couple of extra minutes of him speaking in the castle. Without subtitles I couldn’t make out most of it. I tried to console myself with the fact that at least we were not subjected to the heart-shaped hairdo that Gary Oldman wore in the Coppola Dracula. But really, between the voice and the rot, this Nosferatu asked a lot of the viewer.
At the heart of it, the sad, sick heart
So now I want to leave aside the aesthetics of this movie, and talk about the part of it I’m most interested in interrogating. And that is, the deep trauma at the heart of Ellen. She is the source of the evil, it is revealed, because of that tearful entreaty at the beginning of the movie that invites Orlok into her psyche and eventually, her life. The physicians blame her seizures on excess of blood, part of an overwhelming “base nature” that came on with her young womanhood. This was held at bay when she was married (it’s clear that sex with her husband delayed Orlok for a time).
Eggers also covered this territory in The Witch, when a young girl entering puberty sends her shunned Puritan family into psychic danger, or maybe they just ate blighted corn that made them crazy, but its all centered on her: a lonely girl entering young womanhood in isolation, though as I recall it’s her brother’s puberty that sets it all off.
Ellen is especially lonely for love and touch, as her mother is dead and she’s a privileged child, with all the isolation that seemingly brings. But there’s more to it than that. She starts to confess to her husband, to explain that her starvation for touch led to some kind of event with her father, who found her writhing and unclothed and…she stops there.
The implication is that something deeply traumatic happened that caused her father to reject her. He is not part of the story, even though he is alive. And whatever happened, it sent her to the entreaty at the beginning of the movie, a lonely girl sobbing into the night, craving love and touch. Like the brother and sister in The Witch, young Ellen’s emerging sexuality awakens evil.
When a young woman enters puberty and has desires, it does invite evil into her world in the form of unwanted attention and attempts at predation. But is she the source of that evil, or just the target of it? This is the troubling question at the center of both The Witch and Nosferatu, and both movies seem to say that the only cure for this evil is to surrender to it. That troubles me deeply. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting. I’d rather be wrong, here, but I think I’m right.
And that is my review of Nosferatu. Feel free to tell me what you thought of it in comments.
The Particular Joy of Bad Movies
Some real stinkers
I read the funniest book recently; the good doctor’s book was absolutely entertaining, even though I haven’t seen even one of the movies he discusses:
I kept laughing out loud. And coincidentally, I’ve watched two absolutely terrible movies with my husband in the last two weeks. I’ve discovered that there are particular pleasures of watching something that’s so bad, it’s entertaining.
Yup. Aquaman II, a Jason Momoa Sinker
Aquaman two, which has a longer name involving Atlantis, is the first of the two terrible movies. I watched the first outing in the theater, and enjoyed it because Jason Momoa is a very attractive man who seems to not take himself very seriously. That’s an enjoyable combination. Was the movie sort of goofy? Oh of course it was goofy, it was Aquaman for god’s sake. But, according to Wikipedia, this didn’t matter.
Aquaman premiered in London on November 26, 2018, and was released in the United States on December 21. While the film received mixed reviews from critics, it grossed $1.152 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing DCEU film, the highest-grossing film based on a DC Comics character, the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2018, and (at the time of its release) the 20th highest-grossing film of all time. – Wikipedia
This movie was a romp. A forbidden love, a reluctant chosen one, acres of wildly CGI-ed sea creatures, lots of bubbles and location changes and above all, Jason Momoa looking very Momoan.
I’m for it. So I was very ready for the sequel, not ready enough to pay to see it in a theater, but ready enough to watch it when it hit streaming. Well, we enjoyed it, but not how the producers intended, I am sure.
First, the look of the thing: This movie had the look of bad AI art from beginning to end. It was so blatantly CGI that they should have just scanned the actors’ faces and done the whole thing on the computer. The most distracting aspect was watching the actors’ hair waving around underwater. It looked so strange and blatantly fake that it was distracting. But with a movie this bad, maybe it’s okay to be distracted from it.
Second, the writing: The plot is so senseless that I was grateful for the titles telling me where we were in any given scene. It didn’t mean I knew WHY we were there, but there we were. The beginning part of the movie leans in hard on the kind of humor you either loved or hated in the third and fourth Thor movies (I loved it, I’m a Waititi fan, and yes I know that’s Marvel, but that’s clearly what they were going for). Then they leaned in on Action Drama, so the shift in tone was jarring. And the dialog was…just awful. It’s supposed to be dramatic (I think) when Aquaman yells, “Stay away from my son!” It isn’t. The dialog is so bad that Orm actually says, “Arthur, we need to go. The magic is broken.”
Yup. He says that. “The magic is broken.”
Third, the acting: Jason is one of those actors who can turn in a perfectly respectable performance if he’s directed well, and if he stays in his lane. Like any actor, he requires a decent script. He was definitely in his lane, so I blame the writing and directing for this mess. And speaking of acting, it is painful to watch Nicole Kidman phone in her lines in this mess.
Fourth, Amber Heard: For those of you who live under the sea with Aquaman, Heard is in career trouble since her court appearance with Johnny Depp. Apparently she not only lost the case, she also lost her reputation such as it was. And she complained loudly about being edited out of this movie, in which she was supposed to play an important role. I mean, she really let the world know that she was no longer in Aquaman II. But I saw her repeatedly in this movie. For about three seconds at a time. She’d flash on for a moment, do.a thing, then disappear! And every time I saw her, I turned to my husband and said, “There she is…I don’t see what she’s complaining about.” It was like a drinking game.
Manta: After much scheming, thieving, growling, and violence, when he finally appears in his power suit (which is incredibly well-named as the “Power Suit”) Manta looks like a big, cute, mechanical kittycat.
There are belly laughs to be had in this movie, just not where they were intended. I suggest you watch it a little bit under the influence.
And for the season: Dracula via Coppola, in search of a detour
Yes, this one. I’d recently read an article about Coppola’s best and worst movies, and somehow this made the list of best. Or maybe it was the worst. Or maybe the writer was just saying it wasn’t that bad.
It was that bad.
But let me backtrack. I’ve been reading Dracula Daily again this year. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a Substack where an editor has taken apart the book and reassembled it in consecutive order. What a brilliant idea. I mean, have you ever actually read Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Once you leave behind Jonathon Harker’s journal (which is FANTASTIC), the book is almost unreadable. A friend suggested this as a way to get through the rest of it and it’s helped a great deal. I’m actually reading it for the second time this way, and I plan to read it a third time next year. I even bought the book, available for a reasonable price on Amazon: Dracula Daily. (no, I don’t get any money for recommending it).
So I’ve been in a Dracula frame of mind, and then I read that article or one like it, so I suggested we watch this last night. My husband agreed. We settled in with the lights off and the volume up to witness the spectacle. And what a spectacle it was.
I found myself saying, “That was not in the book,” repeatedly. “Just so you know, that was not in the book.” Especially the more aggressively sexual bits. And of course in the book, Mina is in thrall to Dracula but she’s not HOT for him like she is in this movie. How did this become a love story between Mina and Dracula?
My husband had a theory about that. I’ve never seen the Lugosi film, but hubby loved it as a kid. He explained that tortured romantic plot points from that classic were incorporated into this version. So Coppola took the book, mixed in the movie, and added a bunch of writhing half-naked women vampires for good measure. There’s also an overwhelming and emotionally instructive score. Wow, my favorite.
I’m not saying this movie is bad. I’m saying it’s horrible.
The book feels endless at times, especially when Stoker is indulging in his great love for spoken monologs in obscure accents on the part of his characters, so I should have enjoyed the movie’s ruthless trimming. But there was so much story told in such a rapid, herky-jerky fashion that it felt almost rude, like I was being manhandled, ruthlessly bumped from here to there. And yet…the movie DRAGGED. How could something that truncated feel so endless?
It was Gothic and melodramatic and really, really goofy. My god, the cowboy. He’s absurd in the book but this was so ridiculous. My husband was surprised by how cheap certain things looked, especially the London sets and Keanu’s grey wig. We were both appalled by the heart-shaped white wig the Count wears at the beginning. To quote hubby, “I’m calling that a miss.” I’m drawing a direct line between that wig and Manta’s Power Suit headpiece. It’s a heart. It’s kitty ears. It’s wrong.
I did like the costumes for the most part. Young Vlad is done up in steampunk glory, I mean, he looks fantastic. Mina’s dresses are gorgeous, as are Lucy’s before she dons the diaphanous red. In the first scene where I saw Lucy Westenra’s wedding dress, I couldn’t quite understand it. It seemed to have little to do with the dresses of the day. But once she rose from her crypt to begin feasting on children, it was fantastic. Here is an interesting look at that dress and its inspiration.
So yes, I liked the clothes. So that’s something. But my overall question is, how did any of these actors survive this movie, career-wise?
They weren’t all terrible. Anthony Hopkins was undeniably perfect as Van Helsing; matter of fact, self-satisfied, and calm. Thank god he didn’t talk as much in the movie as he does in the book, because when Van Helsing gets going in the book I want to throw it across the room. And Gary Oldman was great, creepy, disgusting, occasionally quite sexy in his youthful guise, but the accent? It was so thick and gooey in his vampire mouth! Please, why?
As for the rest of them, Hubby says that those were all promising young actors at the time, and they all bought in. They saddled up and chewed the scenery to wood pulp. But why?
HOWEVER. Tom Waits was fantastic as Renfield from start to finish, top to bottom. He is excused from my general condemnation of this strange, silly movie. I hate reading about Renfield in the book, I really do, but he was the highlight of this film. He was maybe the grossest highlight I’ve ever experienced, but Waits was brilliant.
That is all. And don’t cry for me, Argentina. We also watched American Fiction last week, and I loved it.