I enjoy telling people that my favourite film of all time is the one where Tom Cruise baby-traps Brad Pitt in eighteenth-century New Orleans. But there’s plenty of other amazing things to Neil Jordan’s Interview With The Vampire (IWTV), more than words can capture.
IWTV is a stunning film seeping with Southern Gothic charm and that quintessential 90s haze where everything melts into pastels and candlelight. Lingering shots of dusty skies and close-ups on ghostly moonlit faces; the film exhibits a dreamlike, preternatural visuality. It’s like they captured the charm and majesty of everything that Louis’ “vampire eyes” see, just without the cheap coloured-contacts. The dazzling costumes most indulge the eyes; aside from just looking good, they also masterfully dictate the passing of time through frequently-evolving fashions and silhouettes, accentuating the stagnant tragedy of immortality. I dare say these are some of the best historical costumes in cinema.
We also get Tom Cruise’s best role of all time with Lestat, delivering an enigmatic performance which completely captures the character’s uncanny merriment, his adoration disguised as angst, the sheer desperation to keep the family together. And Kirsten Dunst brings the immortal doll Claudia to life with the best child-acting known to man. The scenes of Dunst and Cruise together prove to be among the best of the film. Protagonist Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) is the brooding, angsty, titular “vampire” whose depression manifests as a silent, exhausted rage that sometimes reads as uncomfortable, like Pitt just didn’t want to be there. That we never see anguish from Louis, a moment of vulnerability, only cold anger, is a true shame.
At its core, the film is a parable on the internal debates and the endless suffering of existential depression. It’s a true Interview (a discourse) with the Vampire (that enduring, un-killable part of the mind harbouring the inherent ‘evil’ – the selfishness – of mankind). How do we consolidate morality with human nature? Like Lestat says, “Evil is a point of view.” We, like Louis, focus so much on evaluating our souls, ruminating on damnation, because we are convinced that through “morality” we can evade an unfathomable end. In doing so, we condemn our living existence, the only thing we know for certain to be true, to a preliminary suffering, though hell is not promised for any of us. It’s a story about the self-fulfilling prophecy of eternal damnation.
“The Vampire Chronicles” by ★STAR★ is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.