INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
Like Norm McDonald said: "Not gay enough!"
This seems like a movie tailor-made for me to hate. It stars Tom Cruise, it features vampires as effeminate, whiny glamour boys, and it's all about the French (redundancy alert). Yet somehow, it won me over, in a big way.
Brad Pitt - then still best known as "that guy with the abs in Thelma & Louise" - stars as Louis, a 200-year-old vampire who gives an interview to a New Orleans reporter in the present day. (not mentioning that he's a vampire until the interview begins, one wonders just how he piqued the reporter's interest in the first place) He starts at the beginning, when he was a grieving, borderline suicidal plantation owner with a dead wife and child; one night, he's beset by Lestat (Cruise), who puts the bite on him and offers him the choice of death, or un-death. The rest of the movie follows their weird love/hate relationship, and the introduction of a third vampire into their little family, an eleven-year-old girl named Claudia (Kirsten Dunst).
Cruise actually turns in the only performance of his where I look at him and don't think "Tom Cruise", but maybe it's just because he's blonde here. This is an actor that has scarcely shown a whit of personality or range; his popularity might not surprise me, but the critical respect he's accumulated does. (Pitt suffers from much the same problem, except he can usually be seen trying harder) Cruise gets a lot of unfortunate moments, usually courtesy of Anne Rice who wrote the script based on her own novel (I mean, what's with the one-liners?). But he's usually very good, better in image and movement than in word. Rice was quite displeased with his casting originally - she later retracted after seeing the film.
Lestat is easily the most complex character in the bunch, and if Cruise can't always bring him 100% to life, one can take solace that so few actors could anyway. Before he was turned into a more straight-up hero in The Vampire Lestat, here he is as I like him: decadent, apart from humanity, and at the core of his being, so very lonely. It's great to watch the machinations he puts into place to keep Louis by his side.
Pitt does what he can, but he doesn't for a moment come across as somebody with the experiences of two hundred years under his belt. He's good early on in the film, but as it goes on, one is struck by just how little two hundred years have changed him.
Antonio Banderas shows up later on as Armand, the Parisian head of a clandestine vampire acting troupe. This was just before he blow his shot at A-list stardom by starring in every single movie in 1995, but after he played an endless parade of gay men in various foreign film. (I swear, I can't turn the TV to Showcase without seeing Banderas sucking some guy's dick)
It's definitely Dunst that steals this show, usually creepy but always sympathetic as this unfortunate soul who got vamped at a young age and finds herself trapped in a young body - with young thought processes and impulses, regardless of wisdom accumulated - as the decades pass her by. She's been a child for decades, but she's not an adult in a child's body - she's still a child, and that's very important. Even though in many moments, she's shot in a way that makes her look disturbingly like a grown woman, I think this is to remind us of what she's NOT, not what she is. She does, after all, always start behaving like Claudia again. Her relationship with Louis would have to be read differently if she were supposed to be grown; but it makes sense that a child would want to sleep in her "parent's" coffin.
The movie (and the book, of course) is loaded with great ideas about vampire life - my favorite being the notion of vampire crime and punishment. Two vampires are locked in a well with a steel grate at the top, to await the coming of the sun overhead (the sun directly overhead Paris?); another is entombed in a coffin bricked up in a wall.
But the real triumph of this movie is not in the (scant) story or the (well-done) characters, but in the look and feel of everything. This has got to be the most gorgeous horror movie filmed in my lifetime; to say that the sets and costumes are awesome doesn't quite capture how good they are. So too is the photography; this takes place mostly at night (duh), and we're shown the night through a vampire's eyes as best as can be done; it's clearly night, and everything is rather dark, but everything's quite visible and well-lit, if not lit by anything specific.
Also excellent are the effects and more minor touches. Take what's left of those two unlucky vampires at the bottom of the well. They're like a single statue of two people clinging together, made entirely of ash, and when touched, it crumbles apart. As it crumbles, watch closely ' we see the skin go, but we can also see ribs of ash inside before they too are reduced to formless dust. Wow, that's attention to detail!
Oh, there are things I didn't like about the movie. The movie attempts to glamorize the drinking of blood, and completely fails (I don't think any movie has ever successfully pulled this off). It leaps forward for about thirty years in about five minutes, to illustrate how Claudia remains in this unchanging body. You'd think she'd notice after about three. Even at the ten-year mark, one might think she'd turn to Louis and say "Shouldn't I have boobs by now?"
I also didn't really know what to make of this notion of "vampire beauty". Once bitten and fed, vampires turn into, well, beautiful people. Why would that be? What if you're in a culture with a different concept of beauty? If you're Samoan, would you still turn into a lean, blonde maiden with long, curly locks?
The ending is rather silly, obviously setting things up for a sequel (when did this guy learn to drive, if he doesn't even know that a helicopter light won't kill him?), and throwing in a couple more way-out-of-place one-liners. And the film doesn't really seem to know what to do with vampire abilities - when we first see Lestat, he seems able to fly. Later, we see another vampire dancing on the ceiling (please, no Lionel Ritchie jokes), gravity somehow failing to affect his clothing. So wouldn't those two vampires zip on up to the top of the well and give that grate a try? If they couldn't, why would it even need to be a well, why not just a hole? Even in the first scene, we're shown how a vampire can move faster than a human can perceive. This is never used in quite the right way again - two scenes come to mind, and they're both only in the presence of other vampires, who can (or should) perceive the quick movement quite easily.
Lestat is said to take two or three victims a night - this might be shrugged off in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but people would notice this kind of thing happening in the modern day. I understand that some suspension of disbelief is required for the whole vampire thing to work at all, but c'mon, to feed THAT often?
Also, what's with the gay thing? It's kind of in a netherworld where it's just not at the level of explicitness it should be - Fright Night was loaded with gay overtones without dancing around crying out "Look at how gay I am!". Likewise, what would be wrong with an out-n-out gay-vampire movie? Why all the half-assed innuendo? As it is, the gay overtones in this movie seem just explicit enough to raise some eyebrows, and just vague enough to be, well, safe.
Still, I'm nitpicking here. Interview With The Vampire is as good an adaptation of Rice's novel as we were ever likely to see. I'm still undecided on Rice as an author; I enjoyed this book very much, but its first sequel failed to interest me much, enough that I still haven't gotten any further in the series (despite how good I keep hearing that third book is). The impression I got from both books is that Rice is a woman with vision, if not much of a storyteller. (somebody get this lady a date with Tim Burton, they'd hit it off well)
Directed by Neil Jordan, who also gave us The Company Of Wolves (yay!) and In Dreams (boo!). I can't promise you that your opinion of Tom Cruise will change forever after watching this, but it's a good bet that you'll come away impressed in many ways.
(weird note - this book seems to have attracted an unprecedented following among rock musicians, several of whom - including Steve Vai, Sting, and maybe Michael Stipe - had tried securing the movie rights for it. And one of my favorite, alas defunct, bands, Concrete Blonde, wrote about half an album of somewhat Interview-inspired music, Johnette Napolitano making amusing cracks in interviews about the casting of Tom Cruise, and managing to slag his wife too in the process! I love it!) (on second thought, what am I doing categorizing Michael Stipe as rock?) (other weird note - the closing credits feature the last song Guns N' Roses ever recorded, a cover of "Sympathy For The Devil") (other other weird note - Oprah Winfrey said that she almost puked watching this movie. If I made a movie and Oprah didn't react similarly, I'd consider it a failure.)