NOSFERATU

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Robert Eggers Digs His Own Grave

By Cole Smithey

If you've seen Robert Eggers's excellent film "The Lighthouse," then you should have high expectations for how Eggers could approach the well-worn story of Irish novelist Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel "Dracula."

Sadly, you will be disappointed.

"The Lighthouse" is everything that "Nosferatu" is not — suspenseful, and dark in a terrifyingly human way.

There's not much humanity in this plot-crammed and poorly written "Nosferatu."

Eggers's inspiration arrives via Henrik Galeen's 1925 German expressionist script for F.W. Murnau's groundbreaking if politically problematic silent movie, considering its obvious racist underpinnings.

Overworked and under-edited, Robert Eggers's "Nosferatu" is not without its charms. Lily Rose Depp is a revelation in her exotic role as Ellen Hunter, a young, horny, nubile woman who offers herself up to the universe to be devoured by whatever form (alien, human, evil or otherwise) that comes through her open window.

Careful what you wish for.

A sleepy first act finally gives way to a late reveal of the monster. To be clear, Nosferatu is a hook-nosed freak of nature non-human creature, well except for his exposed penis.

Yes, "Peenee on set" was announced during the filming of the scene where Bill Skarsgård's Nosferatu shows up very nude, and sporting the most ridiculous mustache you've ever seen. 

This Nosferatu gives mustache rides. Now that's scary. Beauty and the beast indeed. Unlike Bela Lugosi's Dracula, this vampire is no charmer. Zero sex appeal on display.

"Nosferatu" is visually stunning but the screenwriting is not up to snuff by a lot.

Eggers is so obsessed with ticking off a checklist of details culled from every vampire movie ever made that he ties himself up. He employs tropes rather than imbuing the story with novel meaning. The movie goes so far as to throw in a gratuitous Exorcist scene that stumbles.

Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu The Vampyre" (1997) is a far superior to Eggers's film in every way. Herzog's movie is simply told in a hyper stylized yet sparse setting where fear and suspense breed.

Hell, Paul Morressey's 1974 cult classic "Blood For Dracula" is a damn sight better than Eggers's movie.

Robert Eggers has squandered a great opportunity to use Bram Stoker's novel as a leaping off narrative form from which to improvise his own cinematic narrative design of suspenseful intent. 

Where is your sense of Jazz improvisation Mr. Eggers?

Come on man; you're better than this.

If it were me I'd have cast Bill Skarsgård as Ellen Hunter's put-upon husband Thomas, and given the role of Nosferatu to his brother Alexander Skarsgård, who I might add would have been much more charming and dignified — think Astro-Hungarian Empire royalty.

I'd have played up suspense in the three hellhounds sequence where Thomas gets chased off a ledge into the abyss below. This sequence should be the centerpiece of the film.

I'd have let Thomas die from his fall, and have him communicate with Ellen telepathically (post-death) in her dreams as Ellen does with her domineering sex master Nosferatu. Nevermind that this vampire has all the appeal of a zombie meth addict with lesions all over his body that rebuke his gigantic well-groomed mustache.

"Nosferatu" is infuriating because of its cut-and-paste approach, and due to its lack of originality.

A miscast Willem Dafoe does the movie no favors as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a Van Helsing archetype. This is the worst performance I've ever seen from Willem Dafoe.

Viggo Mortensen would have been much better casting.

I suppose this film's tag line, "Succumb to the Darkness" is an apt sentiment in the age of global warming and yet another Trump era.

This vampire movie is perfectly watchable; you may feel inclined to nap during it. Don't worry, you won't miss much.

Rated R. 140 mins.

OPHELIA

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Although hindered by a lack of variety in its pacing, this fragrant imagining of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” as lived through the being of Hamlet’s love interest Ophelia, carries significant dramatic weight. There are plenty of juicy surprises to savor along the way.

Naomi Watts and Clive Owen share every bit as much chemistry here (Watts as Queen Gertrude and Owen as the incoming King Claudius), as they did in Tom Tykwer’s “The International” back in 2009. Talk about a winning duo, Owen and Watts are as good as it gets.

What Tom Stoppard did for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with his 1967 post-modern play (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”), young adult novelist Lisa Klein has done for a beguiling character whose personal tale of woe in the Middle Ages clearly deserves its own telling. Semi Chellas’s script adaptation flirts with the intrigue of Shakespeare’s language with a refreshing sense of modern English. The dialogue rings like a bell.

Enter director Claire McCarthy (“The Waiting City”) to helm a brilliant cast in the service of the romantic period drama at hand. Daisy Ridley inhabits Ophelia with an inspired canniness and earthly grounding that places her as an equal to George MacKay’s Prince Hamlet. For once we see Hamlet as the teenage boy that Shakespeare intended. MacKay’s youth informs the role with the energy and naïveté that supports his hot tempered nature.  

For her part, Ophelia keeps a level head in the face of much cruelty and abuses of power that attack her wherever she turns. If the movie resonates with current social and political conditions in America and abroad then so much the better for the audience to contemplate the story’s many implications.    

The filmmakers do a good job of isolating the action within the boundaries of Elsinore’s remote mountain top village where there is truly “something rotten in Denmark.” We get the contrast of the gritty atmosphere outside the castle walls where civility dares not frequent without reliable accompaniment. Although ostensibly made on a considerably smaller budget than anything Hollywood produces, David Warren’s production designs provide an authentic backdrop to the action.

The incestuous nature of the relationship between Hamlet’s power-hungry uncle Claudius and Gertrude is clarified in an appropriately furtive scene that Ophelia witnesses through a window. One of this film's joys is the way characters eavesdrop or spy on others. Suspense and mystery attend violent outbursts, frequently involving swords.

Naomi Watts savors her dual role as the witch Mechtild who Ophelia visits to procure drugs for the Queen. Still, you can help but wish that Watts had taken advantage of the opportunity to chew the scenery more than she does.     

Daisy Ridley’s Ophelia invokes strains of Kiera Knightly’s feisty naturalism even if only for similar facial expressions the two actresses share. “Ophelia” is a refreshing addition to the bold sub-genre of Shakespeare-inspired plays and films that weave in and around the prolific English playwright’s esteemed works. The movie accomplishes that most coveted of dramatic goals of leaving the audience wanting more. So be it, let’s more of these female-centric genre explorations; they are a dozen times more compelling than the Star Wars films that squander the talents of such compelling actresses as Daisy Ridley.

Rated PG. 114 mins.

AMERICAN PSYCHO — CLASSIC FILM PICK

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“American Psycho” (made at the turn of the 21^st century) is a significant connecting link between the ruthless culture of corporate greed revealed in Oliver Stone’s seminal film “Wall Street” and the ascendency of Donald Trump to the throne of United States President.

It’s notable that Stone was temporarily slated to direct “American Psycho,” with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to play the lead, before Mary Harron won the gig with her more perfect casting choice of Christian Bale as the soulless Wall Street narcissist Patrick Bateman.

Coincidentally, “American Psycho” is set in 1987, the same year that “Wall Street” was released on elite American males all to ready to mistake the film’s satire for economic and political doctrine.

With his perfect swimmer’s bod, Patrick Bateman masks his crippling inferiority complex with money and all of its commercially induced trappings. Patrick is a misogynist bully leaked from Donald Trump’s putrid mold.

Something as simple as looking at the (superior) business card designs of his three-piece-suit-wearing Wall Street pals sends our obsessively groomed metrosexual Trump-admirer into a mental breakdown that makes up the meat of the movie. Patrick’s affinity for inane pop music allows Harron to ingeniously show the character’s fractured relationship with society and with his own identity. Before attacking his [perceived] biggest rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto) with an axe, Patrick allows himself some editorial commentary in the form of a running dialogue with himself that could just as well be memorized lines from an unnamed music critic’s review.  

“He’s been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Distorting reality is the name of the game. “Facts do not matter. Facts do not exist. Reality is a liar, and information is your enemy.” That quote, taken from a Zach Schonfeld piece for Newsweek about how Donald Trump distorts reality, exquisitely pinpoints the mindset of “American Psycho’s” anti-hero Patrick Bateman (Bale).

More than anything, entitled Patrick wants to “fit in,” namely by inflicting his inflated sense of status on all people he comes in contact with. “His father practically owns the company” he works for. Bateman’s name is an obvious nod to Norman Bates of Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Like Norman Bates, Patrick Bateman suffers from a dissociative identity disorder. At times he introduces himself as Pat, or as his perceived rival Paul Allen when opportunity serves him. He gets mistaken for his similarly blank-personality Wall Street associates.

Our reliably unreliable narrator/anti-hero isn’t a human being, he is a product, a false and invisible product of all that is wrong with America.

Bale’s disconnected persona keeps a running inner dialogue of political correctness that enables him to speak up for defending Jews when a colleague makes an anti-Semitic remark. But deep down Patrick wants to humiliate, mutilate, and kill minorities and women in the most brutal ways imaginable.

Harron weaves feminist commentary through two female victims of Bateman’s deep seeded self-hatred. His secretary Jean (Chloë Sevigny) and Christie (Cara Seymour), a street-walker prostitute, serve as opposite sides of the same oppressed female coin. The two women also represent the film’s true protagonists, allowing the audience to empathize in a narrative landscape seemingly devoid of compassion.

Co-screenwriter/director Harron composes the film with Hitchcock-inspired compositions to charge the script’s paper-dry wit with a palpable combination of pulsing suspense and pitch black comedy. Like all great films, “American Psycho” is one you can discover something new in regardless of how many times you’ve seen it.

Rated R. 102 mins. 

Mike picked up INDUSTRIAL ARTS POWER TOOLS IPA for our discussion of Mary Harron's unforgettable adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis's AMERICAN PSYCHO. Pull a chair up to the banquet table and join us for one hell of a feast for one hell of a movie!

Bon appétit!