In Defense of Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

“It's is the man himself, look, he's grown young!”. It's a line reading engraved in my memory owing to the severity of its anachronistic delivery by one Keanu Reeves, and is (I believe) a microcosmic example of the wide spread belief that Keanu Reeves was both horribly miscast and painfully bad in Francis Ford Coppola's classic adaptation of Bram Stoker's “Dracula”. While I too patroned this church for some time, the more viewings I had (and I've watched this movie and unnamable amount of times) the more I started to find that Keanu Reeves performance is an integral ingredient to the recipe. Francis Ford Coppola's “Bram Stoker's Dracula” is a lush colored fever dream come to life, toggling between one world (the old ) and another, (the new) magic, and science, both in its consistent anachronistic juxtapositions, and in it and the book’s anxieties around sex, gender, and class. Keanu’s performance mirrors, refracts, embodies, and reinforces these things and in its willingness to repel lies it's magic.

When you watch “Bram Strokers Dracula” there's a underbed of understanding that you are looking back, and the looking back implies a future- which implies a modernity, the lens of which guides it's point of view and it's expressions about sex, gender, and class. It's declarations and prescience about the creeping insurgence of industrialization and the modernization of technology, ideas concerning things like a burgeoning feminists awakening and cinema birthing itself have those conversations from the point of view of someone living in the “now” not the “then”. It does this even while clearly doing an outstanding job of worldbuilding the “then”. Its expressions of the old are in that worldbuilding, it's expressions of the new (though present in some of that world building as well) are most readily present in its casting which went away from our old understanding of who and what these characters look like and what they represent. Keanu Reeves’s prepubescent face, off-kilter style of acting, provided a contextual contrast between old and the modern that aided the movies themes. He, Wynona, and Billy Campbell, represented not only America, (the younger symbol of empire and conquest) but the more modern class of acting against the olden background and the foreground of classically trained brits like Oldman and Hopkins. It enhances the sense of Jonathan Harker as an outsider, reinforced his foreignness. There might have been better actors, but there was no one who was better suited to inherently reflect the themes of innocence tainted as well as the sense of the awkward expressed in the film. After all this is what Keanu Reeves built his career up to and after that point of his career. It's not hard to look at Keanu’s career and note the connected thread of work around the expression of mental agitation, anxiety, and alienation with performed identity and their place in the world. The River's Edge”, “Bill and Ted's excellent Adventure”, “Point Break”, “My Own Private Idaho”. Each of these are men in search of something, anxious about a sense of oppression and obstruction from who they really can be. They can't quite articulate it, and are alienated by that inability. On most occasions these men find a partner (usually a man) whom they hope to find answers from and do but also find more questions. “Bodi”, “Morpheus”, “John Milton”, “Count Dracula”.

One definitive through-line in Reeves’s career has been that of the male ingenue. He’s believably unsophisticated, (though he comes off the opposite when he speaks as an actor and person) and usually plays some cousin of virtuous and/or innocent under threat, many times from the person whose spell he’s fallen under, and of course he is beautiful. Like the classic Hollywood sexpots that came before him -the Monroes, Garbos and Hepburns (Audrey) - he reeks of sex and sexuality. Its an attribute that engages in an alluring dance with their innocence, one that only furthers our desire for them. We also wish to see them protected, which clashes with their actual lives which they guard and protect fiercely, only adding fuel to the fire of the allure. Ingenues on film historically need guidance, someone to be of aid and service to them, but also protect them. This too is a through-line throughout Reeves’s career. Sometimes these people can also be the very ones meant to harm them. In “Dangerous Liaisons” it’s Glenn Close who patronizes the young virtuous Keanu, who is ignorant of all the ways in which she toys with him- even in the end he staunchly defends her. In Kathryn Bigelow’s “Point Break” it’s Patrick Swayze’s “Bodhi”, whom he ultimately can't even bring in, because to do so would be to end that relationship, and worse still, destroy everything he loves about the man. If the quality of naivety, of the ingenue, the eager-to-please doesn't embody in any major way the qualities you would associate with Jonathan Harker, then you’ll find exception with the fact that he doesn't conquer any aspect of Victorian-era British identity in that role, to say nothing of the accent, but if you, like I think this is a spot-on summation of Jonathan Harker, then Keanu’s casting becomes much clearer.

Keanu is as close to an ingenue as it comes for a male movie star. Even more though than Keanu's virtuous candor, and ready-made innocence, his mastery over his body is another vital ingredient to making his performances work. One of the most glaring and consistent attributes of Coppola’s adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel is its obsession with movement; Coppola twists it, and gnarls it, slows it and speeds it up. Dracula's shadow, the strange carriage rider and the eerie way he reaches out for Jonathan are related to the unnerving quality of the movement itself. The opening sequence features the use of puppets for its opening battle, their stunted and stilted movement, versus the interpretive dance-like quality of “Lucy”s (played exquisitely by Sadie Frost) movements also bears this out. Whether walking through the garden in the night possessed by Dracula’s murderous hymn, or in sexual ecstasy with a wolf, or climbing back into her casket, movement is the life blood of Coppola’s film. This makes Keanu’s casting a bonafide compliment considering what is arguably his career defining trait. He's become one of America's greatest action heroes precisely because he understands his body on camera and moves with incredible agility and intensely alluring grace. This all comes to bear in Coppola's film. The most vivid example is Jonathan's seduction at the hands of Dracula’s brides. The scene begins innocently enough with Harker exploring the part of the castle the Count specifically told him to avoid. He wonders around with that “Reevesian” otherworldly awe that undergirds even the plainest of his line deliveries (“Whoa”) as he wrestles with things he sees but cannot understand because he is a rational man, both in matters of earth, and as we see, of sex. His curiosity eventually leads him through to a bed, beckoned by the possibilities of sexually charged mewing of Mina’s voice (he has so far denied) in the darkness. Keanu had even by this time long been accused of being wooden or stiff, it was then as it is now an impossibly lazy and reductive statement that made its bed in the pseudo-“surfs up” tonality of his line readings and never bothered to survey the house. Everything Reeves does is with direct intention and understanding; he sits down on the bed, stiffly but in anticipation. When the first bride arrives and it is clear he is under their spell, Keanu's writhing and moaning suggest where Harker is at with his sexuality, it is forced and restrained, also freeing. He opens his legs as if struggling to do so, sits up rapidly and nearly yells in sexual bliss. The sound both repels and attracts us, a climax for Harker’s own arc towards depravity and sexual freedom. When his trance and ecstasy is abruptly interrupted by Dracula's appearance, and he is forced to watch as the brides are offered the consolation meal of a young child the horror on his face could be ascribed to not only what he is watching but what he has been party to, and what in essence he fears he may become. The build up to- and the subsequently the resplendent look of horror in his face, is one of the great facial expressions in cinema empowered by how he uses almost every corner of his visage, and the logic by which it is viewed as bad acting escapes me to this very day. The trauma of the event, the euphoria amid acts he did not consent to changes Harker, and that change is apparent in Keanu's performance. Afterwards, he is less stiff, more dour; in grief, but also surer of himself. The Harker that Reeves shows us at the beginning of the film was a fumbler of words, an awkward man in front of those whose respect he desires. The Jonathan we see at the end now leads men; he knows of his own words and place in the world. He is present and less fashionable with the presentation of manhood common at the time, he’s Keanu. Harker’s newfound confidence is never more present than in his first conversation with Anthony Hopkins’s Van Helsing. There’s a sincerity in his face, his breath, the downcast eyes when he speaks his fear, a testament to his vulnerability, and where he was before his sexual awakening which was also traumatic. The confidence we hear in his delivery of "I know where the bastard sleeps" the loss of it in "I brought him there". Forget how his accent sounds; that’s little more than a distraction. Watch his face and body, and you’ll see the essence of Keanu.

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Keanu’s face and especially his body (as per usual) is his greatest weapon in the film. His child-like sense of wonder and curiosity a close second. To watch him is to watch the transformation of Harker as much as it is to watch the transformation of Dracula and the world that has left him behind. The almost the universal disdain for this particular role is trapped in a universal understanding of the expectations of the genre, and of this particular story, and of our ideas around British-ness. It is rooted in the exaggerative power given to the conquering of an accent which would make for a whole different essay. The hyperbolic consternation with Reeves casting and the performance is as incurious and banal to me as those who seek to have their favorite comic book characters or cartoon characters be a one for one with the actors who play them. It shows a blatant disregard for imagination, and worse still for the considerable skills that Keanu brings to any role- despite what effect his well known inflection may or may not have on the role. While I wouldn't venture as far as to call this one of Keanu's best roles, I believe it is most certainly one of his most interesting, as a casting based more in spiritual recreation, rather than the spot on avatar of the Jonathan Harker we've seen in just about every other representation or adaptation of the book. The role is best looked at as yet another tool and anachronistic symbol of Coppola’s contradicting and competing themes to which Reeves stood out as the most realized of all.