Movie: Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994)
Any journalist would be happy to get an interview with a vampire. Especially if that vampire is just eloquent and humane enough to make his story more palatable for the audience. It's rather funny how this film presents all vampires engaging in amoral activities, except for our main man Louis, who, as one of the 'good ones', happens to have something of a conscience and shares 'our' awareness of good and evil and morality. Who knew that Hollywood's formula for depicting (heroic) minorities could also be applied to vampires?
Joking aside, this is actually a rather good film with a terribly dull performance by Brad Pitt and a fantastic (and completely surprising) one by Tom Cruise. That's not entirely Pitt's fault. Neil Jordan mostly uses him to make the medicine go down, to do cool shit he usually wouldn't get away with. The first hour of this film is almost filled to the brink with grotesque imagery, violent cruelty, sexual deviancy, unseemly metaphors and vampires who unequivocally enjoy all that, with the exception of Pitt's Louis who occasionally chimes in to remind the audience how uncomfortable all that abnormality really made him. Meanwhile, Jordan and Cruise have the time of their lives, playing around with vampire lore, portraying vampires as creatures who receive (and provide) orgasmic pleasure when sucking the blood of their victims. Almost all these scenes are staged to accentuate as much as possible both their sexual connotations and their aggressive violence, without discriminating whether Lestat (Cruise) and Louis bite each other, or another man, woman or child.
Louis may mournfully tell us that he regrets biting 13 year old Claudia (Kirsten Dunst, proving that she was a huge talent from the very beginning), but the film happily shows them sleeping (only sleeping, but still) in a coffin together. Claudia discovers the joys of vampirism going around town with a clear thirst for blood killing older women and men and getting the same orgasmic pleasure out of it as Lestat and Louis do, while the three of them form a surrogate (vampire) family. Cruise portrays Lestat as a combination of a wise, catty diva and an aggressive, cruel macho who enjoys the gleeful immorality of his violence and bloodlust, and only further emphasises these characteristics when performing his 'fatherly' duties to Claudia. Meanwhile, Claudia, who ages over 30 years over the course of the film, but remains in the body of young Kirsten Dunst, jealously watches grown up naked women having bodily features she'll never have.
After that first hour Lestat mostly disappears from the film, and we follow Louis as he goes from New Orleans to Paris to seek answers to existential questions (Why is he a vampire? Who was the first vampire? How can a vampire be good? Who gives a shit?) and to become a conventional Hollywood hero who takes vengeance on bad vampires. I could live without the solemn earnestness with which these questions are approached. Aside from that, the film also seems to want to address the differences and similarities between colonial America and aristocratic Europe, but that never really coheres into anything. The biggest problem is though that Pitt remains gravely, joylessly uptight through it all. Yet, the film's best scene does take place in Paris, during a theater play in which 'vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires' (Claudia helpfully tells us that is very avant-garde) lure an unknowing actress to her death. Finally, it's worth noting that the film's framing structure is terrible. Louis tells his story in an interview to a journalist played by Christian Slater, but there is absolutely no character, or any kind of, development in these lifeless scenes. Eventually they do set up the great final moments of the film, which should be considered among the highlights of Cruise' career.
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