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Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt bite and flirt in high-minded, but rather camp, Interview with the Vampire |
Director: Neil Jordan
Cast: Tom Cruise (Lestat de Lioncourt), Brad Pitt (Louis de
Pointe du Lac), Christian Slater (Daniel Molloy), Kirsten Dunst (Claudia),
Antonio Banderas (Armand), Stephen Rea (Santiago), Domiziana Giordano
(Madeleine), Thandie Newton (Yvette)
Why do vampires constantly keep rearing their ugly heads in
films? What is it about them that we seem to find so addictive? Interview with the Vampire is a vampire
film that takes a slightly different tone and tries to explore what it might
actually be like to live the life of a vampire, the actual psychological impact
it might have. It’s just a shame the film also can’t escape the temptation to
fall back on the high camp the genre often gets trapped in.
Anyway, the film opens in modern day San Francisco, with
young reporter Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater) interviewing a man named Louis
(Brad Pitt) who claims to be an ageless vampire from the late 18th century.
Louis tells his life story: turned to a vampire by the hedonistic Lestat (Tom
Cruise) when he was consumed with grief at the loss of his wife and child.
Louis struggles with the morality of taking life, unlike Lestat’s joy in
killing. Later they turn a dying girl Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), who over the
next 30 years matures psychologically but remains in the body of a 12-year-old.
Louis and Claudia slowly begin to fear Lestat’s control and struggle to escape
from his shadow.
Interview with the Vampire wants, desperately, to be an
intellectual vampire film. A sort of Freudian exploration of the impact of
suddenly becoming a creature that can never see daylight, sleeps in a coffin
and has an insatiable hunger for human blood. Does it work? Well sort of, I
guess. But the problem is most of the depression is carried by Brad Pitt’s
Louis and, to put it frankly (as Lestat observes) he’s a whiner. His very human
struggle with taking life and his sadness at the loss of his humanity should be
engaging, but Louis is not an interesting character. He just mopes around. Rather
than being sparked by his predicament, he’s just a boring and frustrating
character.
Maybe this is partly Pitt’s performance as well – too
withdrawn, too morose. Apparently Pitt hated making the movie (from the long
hours of make-up, to the endless night shoots, to the boring character) and it
shows in the movie. Pitt just can’t get engaged in the role, his matinee idol
looks and rather dull speaking voice combining to make him look like a worse
actor than he is. And then Louis keeps
banging on and on about how depressed
he is. In fact he bangs on so much you start to wonder why everyone – from Tom
Cruise’s crazed Lestat, to Antonio Banderas’ ageless vampire – is so obsessed
with him.
But then maybe it’s Louis’ looks eh? The film does wallow in
the sensuality of sucking on people’s necks, and half the vampires in this seem
to be campily metro-sexual. Cruise gives a surprisingly out-there performance
of high camp hedonism and preening selfishness, so far out of his expected
range that (while not brilliant) it reminds you he is a better actor than he
gets credit for. Lestat clearly has a huge crush for Louis, and the orgasmic
converting of Louis into a vampire leaves little to the imagination. Later
Antonio Banderas as an effeminate, ethereal older vampire also seems to have a
huge crush on Louis. The many vampire victims seem to succumb to erotic joy
when they are bitten (at least until they die). Sex flows over the whole film,
without the film itself ever actually being sexy, and the vampires are all
pretty indiscriminate in their tastes.
Unfortunately this all too often tips into pure high camp.
Stephen Rea, as a sort of vampire acrobat actor, gives a performance of superb
silliness. Banderas lisps and wafts through the picture like a bizarre puff of
perfume. Neil Jordan frequently explores the frame with ridiculous overblown
action – no less than four times in the picture we watch scenes of operatic
fire starting (often with vampires writhing in flamey pain) that suggest Jordan
spent too long watching the fire sequence in Gone with the Wind before he
made the picture. All the actors (aside from Pitt who barely shows up) dial it
up to eleven with their performances, and the long-haired, long finger-nailed
vampire representations here are like some sort of odd Halloween dressing up
box.
Jordan’s film often trades dark, campy humour in favour of
horror or thrills. There are no real jumps or scares in the picture, and the
buckets of blood thrown around are more ridiculous than they are disgusting. In
fact watching the film, I feel Jordan may have been torn between wanting to do
something a little different (a sad vampire film about depression) and having
to deliver the blood, guts and gore the genre fans wanted. Certainly, he fails
to mine any real poetry from Anne Rice’s source material (although she loved
the film, so what do I know) and for all the musings on the tragedies of living
a life in the shadow you never really feel that moved by it.
There are however good things. Technically the film is very
good. Cruise is surprisingly fun as the colourful Lestat. The film gets stolen
by Kirsten Dunst as the physically young, mentally older Claudia, who struggles
to find the balance between her teenage blood lust and her later disgust and
fury at being trapped forever in the body of a child. But there isn’t enough
good stuff among the tosh. Interview with
the Vampire is an odd, actually rather bad film that is struggling to be a
good one. It has a cast of 1990s heartthrobs who mostly enjoy dressing up and
playing at their campy side. But it fails to really be engaging or make someone
care about the story it is trying to tell.
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