  (out of four)
By David N. Butterworth
Shadow of the Vampire features a typically earnest performance by John
Malkovich as the great German Expressionist filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau,
spitting lines like "We are scientifically engaged in the creation of
memory!" and "Why don't you eat the script girl!" with gay abandon.
And it features a wonderfully creepy, nuanced performance by Willem Dafoe
as Max Schreck, the mysterious vampire-like star of Murnau’s gothic
masterpiece, Nosferatu.
But there’s not much else to E. Elias Merhige’s slow-moving tale about the
making of Murnau’s classic 1922 film.
The focus, of course, is on Dafoe, who looks terrific–and acts
terrifically–under all that makeup. As
Count Orlok (Bram Stoker’s estate refused the director the rights to film
Stoker’s Dracula so Murnau simply changed the name) he outdoes Jim Carrey
in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Needless
to say Dafoe’s performance is more introspective, although he does roll his
eyes a lot in keeping with the over-the-top acting style of the times.
Credit, too, must be given to Dafoe’s startling makeup
design. Ann Buchanan makes Dafoe a
very convincing-looking Schreck, from the little tufts of white hair behind his
pixie-like ears to his long, skeletal fingers, which look like a cross between
Freddy Krueger’s razor-sharp appendages and those of the face hugger from Alien–wizened
and white-knuckled with fingernails as long as a toll collector’s on the
Jersey turnpike.
Like Gods and Monsters, a 1998 film that chronicled the making of James
Whale’s Frankenstein, Shadow of the Vampire is a thoughtful,
contemplative film that attempts to inject new blood into the machinations of a
cinematic auteur. Unlike Bill
Condon’s film, however, we do get some insight into the mind of a man who
conjured up truly horrific visions–Murnau was a fanatic and an obsessive, one
who defied his producer (here played by the great Udo Kier), worked excessively,
hounded his actors, kept secrets, and left everything to chance, all tempered by
daily doses of laudanum. Unfortunately,
the shaggy dog core of the film is that Schreck wasn’t exactly acting when he
sucked the blood of his leading lady (we’re tipped off in an opening title
board that refers to Nosferatu as one of the most realistic
vampire films ever made). This puts
a bit of a shaky spin on an otherwise “serious” treatment.
Under Merhige’s workmanlike direction, Shadow of the Vampire is murky
and meditative while revisiting the kind of murky vampire lore we’ve seen a
thousand times before. Malkovich,
surprisingly, doesn’t even attempt a German accent!
(Cary Elwes, as a replacement cinematographer, does, and it’s to his
discredit.) The opening credits
sequence is puzzling and interminable–it’s not obvious what we’re supposed to
be looking at–and sets a bad tone for what is to come.
Co-produced by Nicolas Cage of all people, Shadow of the Vampire is still
worth catching for, if nothing else, Dafoe’s fine contributions.
It’s an Oscar®-caliber performance that, sadly, will no doubt be
dismissed along with the film itself (as "just another vampire
picture").
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