Shadow of the Vampire
E Elias Merhige

Most lightweight film critics have been falling all over themselves to praise Shadow of the Vampire, presumably just to assure everyone that they’re in on the joke, that they get all the references.

The stodgier critics at the other end of the spectrum who approach their work from a more academic and/or historical perspective have been quick to point out how unfairly both director FW Murnau (played here by John Malkovich) and his masterpiece Nosferatu are treated. Though the latter tendency is infinitely more defensible than the former, one needn’t call down the high holy gods of silent cinema in order to criticise a movie that’s so unskilled and haphazard. The film is so silly that it incriminates itself.

Gilbert Adair says in his introduction to the compelling anthology Movies, 'the single most significant fact about the cinema at the turn of the millennium is that everyone now is a film buff.' The truth of this claim does little to justify the oft-cited qualification, 'if you’re a film buff who’s seen Nosferatu, you’ll love Shadow of the Vampire!' The fact is that anyone with a vague concept that sometime in the 1920s someone made some kind of movie about vampires that didn’t star Bela Lugosi should be sufficiently informed about what’s being skewered in Shadow of the Vampire. Any further knowledge of film history is just icing on the cake. Potentially distracting icing, at that.

Shadow of the Vampire is trying to be a German Expressionist Nurse Betty, organised around the conceit that lead actor Max Schreck (played with relish by a virtually unrecognisable Willem Dafoe), portraying the blood-thirsty Count Orlock, actually was a vampire. This concept has the potential to yield brilliant observations about the fluid and perplexing tension between life and art, about the movie camera’s ability to expose reality as well as conceal it, about some artists’ compulsion to feed off the life-giving energy of friends, family, and colleagues in order to create their own work. But this movie does none of the above.

The script seems overly enchanted with its own cleverness, and as a consequence the premise weighs heavily on it. As it stands now, the film feels like a three-minute comedy sketch that got needlessly stretched out to an hour and a half. You find yourself waiting for some action to kick into high gear, and the credits are rolling before anything ever does. The script is amateurishly sloppy, and the characters (based on the real-life participants in the making of Nosferatu) are wooden and one-dimensional. Malkovich as Murnau does his freaky-screamy-tormented-genius thing which makes you wish that Cameron Diaz would suddenly be teleported into his body, if only to break the monotony for a while.

Cary Elwes literally flies in about half-way through the film as cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner and slides by on his oddly misplaced but always enjoyable swashbuckling charm. Eddie Izzard still seems to be learning how to adapt his highly potent stage presence to the screen, so his forgettable turn as actor Gustav von Wangenheim is somewhat understandable, if unfortunate. Catherine McCormack seems to be around just to throw some Cabaret-esque sex appeal into the mix with a totally random breast-shot about three quarters of the way through. Dafoe has just been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his one-note but entertainingly over-the-top performance as Max Schreck. The category should be renamed this year as Best Supporting Over-Actor so that Dafoe could enter into a sudden death scenery-chewing match with Gladiator’s Joaquin Phoenix.

It’s worth noting that the barely covert anti-Semitism present in Nosferatu is absent here. The vampire’s nose has been slightly whittled down to a more politically correct rat-like point instead of maintaining the grossly exaggerated stereotype of a 'Jewish' nose in the 1922 version. That issue could have been mined for a sub-plot that would have more pointedly contextualized the making of the film. But as slapdash as this movie is, that is one historical inaccuracy that I can live with.