A Vampire With Heart . . .

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

DIRECTOR: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

WRITER: JAMES V. HART

THE BOTTOM LINE: Coppola brings the old spook story alive -- well, undead -- as a luscious, infernal romance.

HE IS ROMEO, WHOSE YOUNG wife, believing him dead, kills herself. He is Lucifer, vowing revenge on the God who has betrayed him. He is Don Juan, sucking the innocence out of his conquests. He is the Flying Dutchman, sailing the centuries for an incarnation of the woman he loved. He is Death, transmitting a venereal plague in his blood, in his kiss. He is even Jesus, speaking Jesus' last words as he dies, a martyr whose mission is to redeem womankind. Husband, seducer, widower, murderer, Christ and Antichrist, Dracula contains multitudes. He is every mortal man and every mortality with which man threatens women.

But is he "Bram Stoker's Dracula"? Though the screenplay is more faithful than most vampire movies to the book's plot, its Dracula is light-years from Stoker's. The novel's count was no demon lover; he was a pestilence, the lord of bats and rats, and his touch was not romantic but rabid. He represented unseductive evil. Bram Stoker's Dracula proposed that English innocence could be sucked dry by European decadence, until English common sense drove a stake through its lurid heart.

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, to call it by its rightful name, powerfully reimagines this Victorian myth for the age of AIDS. Dracula (Gary Oldman) is a warrior-wooer impaled on the cross of his love; he must track his obsession until he is released from it. His misery gives him mesmeric mastery. The wretched Renfield (Tom Waits -- terrific) bays to do Dracula's bidding. Flowers wilt at the count's passage, and maidens burn at his touch. A young woman's tears turn to pearls in his hand.

So if Dracula is the world's oldest man, he is also the first man of the modern sexual revolution, awakening the erotic impulse in young women like flirtatious Lucy (Sadie Frost) and chaste Mina (Winona Ryder). They have known only puppy love; now they will taste wolf lust. And yet Dr. Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins), who would purge Dracula's spirit from their bodies, is working his white magic on the wrong subjects. Dracula is the cursed soul in need of exorcism. He has "come across oceans and time" to find it. And only Mina, the avatar of his dead wife, can provide it.

Coppola composes movies as Wagner composed operas, setting primal conflicts to soaring emotional lines. The force of his will is as imposing as the range of his art. He goes for majesty over subtlety and, often as not, finds what he's looking for. Magic-lantern images are everywhere: in the blood pouring from an altar crucifix; in the Castle Dracula chauffeur garbed as Darth Vader; in the endless supertrain of the count's cape; in the placental gel and rat's-nest cocoons that encase the vampire. But more: in the wonderfully spectral mood that does justice to the romance at Dracula's heart.

Everyone knows that Dracula has a heart; Coppola knows that it is more than an organ to drive a stake into. To the director, the count is a restless spirit who has been condemned for too many years to interment in cruddy movies. This luscious film restores the creature's nobility and gives him peace.