Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994)

A Bloody Mess

(WARNING: Plot twists and story discussed in explicit detail)

When I saw Interview With The Vampire I was floored, I couldn't get the movie out of my mind. Said to myself: have to read the book. The very next day I hooked myself a copy and read it. I couldn't believe it, I was devastated; the book if anything was worse than the movie.

Ann Rice's novel begins with an irresistible premise: a news reporter interviewing Louis, a two-hundred-year-old vampire. With a hook like that, how can anyone not write a thrilling pop masterpiece? Rice tries her level best. Her protagonist is an insufferable whiner; when not complaining about Lestat (the vampire who 'made' him), Louis whines about loneliness and a general state of listlessness (this from a man who stays up all night sucking). The moaning goes on for about a hundred pages (the longest hundred pages you'll ever read) till Louis bites a child named Claudia, who gives him a reason to look beyond his self-centered bitching. The two ditch Lestat and go in search of other undead, who in turn show their hospitality by frying Claudia and shutting Louis in a box. Louis takes revenge, takes a break for the next century, and doesn't really do anything significant till present day when he sits down for his press interview.

Rice writes all this in what is supposed to be the feminist style of the 70's (Actually, Rice's prose is quite an achievement, managing to be overpoweringly purple without producing a single memorable detail, a sort of concentrated blandness). Despite all her efforts the novel became a bestseller and cult classic; you might ask why till you remember the '70s also brought us Love Story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and The Partridge Family (To be honest I prefer Love Story, which refuses to hide the fact that it was written solely for the purpose of jerking readers dry; it has the virtue of its own shamelessness. Also, it's shorter).

The novel is said to be more popular with female rather than male readers, that men are turned off by the implied androgyny and homoerotic passages; I don't think it's a sex thing at all; I think Rice is a genuinely bad writer. In a flash he fastened on me... I thrashed against him wildly. I dug my boot into his chest and kicked him as fiercely as I could, his teeth stinging my throat, the fever pounding in my temples.... If Rice had bothered to visualize, she might've realized the scene looks less like a desperate encounter between man and vampire and more like Reed Richards vs Patrick O'Brian.

The film improves on the book several ways. First, no prose; second, punched-up dialogue with a dose of humor (vampires are supposed to be undead not deadly boring); last and most infuriating, Neil Jordan. Jordan is a not ungifted filmmaker who has dealt in horror fantasies (Company of Wolves); his images flow with the swiftness and clarity of a remembered nightmare-- misted forests, redhooded girls, giant toadstools, bottomless wells. An egg hatches a little stone child with tears in its eyes; an endless line of wolves leap gracefully through a bedroom window to the accompaniment of screams.

Jordan manages to lend the same dreamlike quality to Interview without repeating himself. When Lestat 'makes' Louis at a ship's wharf he lifts Louis bodily past canvas and riggings into the night sky. 'Enough?' asks Lestat, who promptly drops him, properly deflowered, into the sea-- the film's first soaring moment, and nowhere in the book. 

What cripples this film about vampires is well the vampires. In the book, the boy notes Louis' French accent, befitting a New Orleans native; Pitt's diction is pure Hollywood Boulevard. He poses like a sullen Method actor when what's needed is some young and dashing figure comfortable in period costume (Where was Julian Sands when we needed him?). Pitt does manage to convey Louis' weariness and self-disgust, perhaps a little too well; we end up feeling weary and disgusted putting up with him.

Antonio Banderas fares better, despite the faux Cher wig; with his handsome glare and thick accent, he sounds decadent enough to play Armand, the oldest of vampires. Banderas has a moment where he passes his fingers over a candle flame and sighs with pleasure; he fails, however, to pass himself convincingly off as four hundred looking thirty.

Which Kirsten Dunst does without breaking into a sweat; as Claudia, Dunst shows the right mix of eerie youth and chilling experience. Jordan knows a good thing when he sees one and in Dunst' case gives her the works; turned, Dunst literally blooms before our eyes, her cheeks glowing red, her head sprouting gold curls. Dying from sunlight she turns into an ashen figure straight out of Hiroshima and Dresden-- there's a return to innocence in her final image that's eerily moving. Dunst takes everything Jordan gives and responds with an amazing performance: she's funny when she proves incapable of leaving her piano instructor or dressmaker alone, poignant when gazing enviously at a nude woman, knowing she can never be like that. And she can be unsettlingly seductive beyond her age when circling Louis and whispering that he is father and mother and she loves him.

As the interviewer Malloy, Slater improves on Rice's moistfaced twerp, his skeptical slouch and raised eyebrows a nice antidote to Pitt's tall tale, the better to persuade us as well as himself when he finally comes to believe. Need to mention Stephen Rea, who played soulful IRA terrorist in Jordan's The Crying Game; the sad smile and hangdog charm there has here become psychotic. With only minutes of screen time and a handful of lines, Rea as Santiago is easily the most convincing of vampires, his ferocious snarl and feral eyes promising more evil than he's allowed to do (Rea would have made an admirable Lestat).

Bringing us to the movie's true horror, Tom Cruise. Rice reportedly protested when Cruise was chosen, then bought newspaper ads retracting her objections when she saw his performance; don't know what bit her, but she was right the first time. Cruise brings to Lestat everything he brought to all his roles, from Top Gun downwards: mannered charm, toothy smile, squeegee voice. Listen when he yells 'you idiot!' at Louis, which he does all the time (Louis isn't exactly the sharpest fang in the film); Cruise admitted in an interview that he uses a special recording technique, supposedly given by the Church of Scientology, to electronically enhance his voice. The movie star should sue the Church; onscreen he sounds like either Chip or Dale, can't decide which.

What hurts is that Cruise gets the best lines. At one point Lestat informs Malloy that he's had centuries of Louis's whining, and we laugh in sympathy-- after over two hours of Pitt's moaning we know how he feels. In the book Lestat is coarse, ignorant; the film version gifts him with a sense of camp. When he catches Louis biting the then-mortal Claudia, Lestat, inspired, picks up the corpse of Claudia's mother-- dead from plague-- and dances with it. The book views this scene as the ultimate horror; the film views it as black comedy, the horror emerging all the clearer.

Jordan with the help of cinematographer Philippe Rousselot photographs gorgeous candlelit tapestries-- you can hardly call them images: African slaves capering before a plantation mansion in flames; vampires strolling down wet cobblestone streets; Lestat's throat cut, the blood pooling like black ink on a parchment. But to what purpose-- a movie as dramatically inert as it is visually ravishing?  The leads act like wimps, the supports are hardly allowed to act, the plot meanders like an anemic bloodsucker.  Do yourself a favor, watch the film-- it's a beautiful film, there's no denying that-- but first buy a bag of popcorn, go to your seat, lean back, relax; then with both eyes wide open, take a kernel in either hand, and plug your ears.

Manila Chronicle 1/18/95