It’s kind of astonishing that it has taken so long for the uncanny actor Caleb Landry Jones to land the immortal role of Dracula. I mean, look at the guy. His pallor is generally that of a being who not only doesn’t get much sun, but has to go to some lengths to avoid it. Have you seen Jones in one of the Safdie brothers’ early films, the incredible junkie chronicle “Heaven Knows What”? He looks like the real deal, addiction-wise, in that. And makes some unusual choices, acting-wise; I’m not sure if he was deliberately imitating “The Room”’s Tommy Wiseau or not, but he sounded like him to such a great extent I was almost waiting for him to tell his girlfriend or his dealer, “You’re tearing me apart!”
He is no longer quite as eccentric a performer as he once was. In this film, he adopts an Eastern European accent but doesn’t really go nuts with it. He doesn’t really go nuts at all…EXCEPT when he murders the priest who couldn’t vouchsafe the life of his beloved 1480 wife Elisabeth, and then, when, having transformed into a vampire through some combination of priest-killing and blasphemy (who knew it was so easy), he goes about chomping into the necks of his victims and drinking deeply of their hemoglobin. Which he does with a brio that verges on the camp, as in a montage in which he hypnotizes the ladies of various continental dance events and has a vein-busting good time with dozens at once.
This kind of move is no surprise coming from director Luc Besson, the French maestro of excess whose audacity paid off in spades with 1997’s “The Fifth Element.” He’s been hard-pressed to reproduce that success ever since, and as the years have gone on, he’s not been able to command the kind of budget that helped make “Element” soar. But he never stops whacking at a vision. The movie begins with a battle-in-armor scene in which the participants are engulfed in flame. The fire this time is clearly digital. Later in the movie, in Dracula’s castle, we see that the count is attended by the gargoyle statues, which have come to some kind of accursed life. Too bad they mostly kind of look like Dobby from the “Harry Potter” universe, only gray. (This decorative element does have something of a punchline, and it’s not an unamusing one to be honest.)
Besson, still a bit of a romantic, has subtitled his tale “A Love Story,” and the stress here is on Count Vlad’s romantic obsession. In 1480 he loses Elizabeth, and 400 years later, lounging about in Paris, which is really a great spot for a vampire when you think about it—one wonders whether our hero hung out with Baudelaire before that wicked poet died in the late 1860s—he meets, via estate agent Jonathan Harker (yes, the scenario does hew closely to Stoker’s, and to Browning’s, and to Coppola’s) the lovely Mina, played by Zoë Blue, the beautiful daughter of Rosanna Arquette. (Hmm. In Robert Eggers’ recent “Nosferatu,” Mina was played by Lily-Rose Depp. One more famous-person-child in a Dracula movie constitutes a trend!) In contrast to Mina’s purity, we have Matilda De Angelis’ far friskier Maria, whose lusty reunion with boyfriend Henry (David Shields) is a gory highlight.
Christoph Waltz must have one amusing agent. Late last year, he appeared in Guillermo Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” as the titular mad scientist’s mentor; here, he plays an unnamed priest who serves the story’s Van Helsing function of hunting down and, hopefully, putting down the vampire. Oddly enough, he gives the more restrained performance in this otherwise gonzo picture. Besson doesn’t build up the romantic emotion he apparently aspires to with his efforts, but “Dracula” gets by on the power of his (and Landry’s) conviction.
