INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Antonio Banderas. Screenplay: Anne Rice. Director: Neil Jordan.
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE has far more in common with MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN than a November release date. To begin with the obvious, both are based on florid novels featuring "monsters" in existential crisis, rooted deeply in the authors' feelings of loss. And both were the subject of intense pre-release scrutiny as a result of off-beat casting decisions. However, the most relevant--and unfortunate--similarity between the two is what ends up on the screen. INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE is a spectacularly executed production, perhaps more consistent in its tone than FRANKENSTEIN, but it also lacks that film's high points; it's simply too plot-heavy, and ends up feeling extremely rushed.
The story is told in flashback, as 200-year-old Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) tells the story of his life to a young interviewer (Christian Slater) in contemporary San Francisco. In 1791 New Orleans, plantation owner Louis despairs over the deaths of his wife and daughter, a despair sensed by the vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise). Lestat offers Louis the chance to become like him, but after he accepts, he soon realizes the implications of his choice--a bloodlust he loathes but can't resist. When Louis contemplates leaving Lestat, Lestat creates another vampire, the child Claudia (Kirsten Dunst). But Louis and Claudia still rebel, and attempt to find out more about their nature when they travel to Paris and find a cadre of vampires led by the seductive Armand (Antonio Banderas).
First, to the single most pressing question to anyone familiar with Anne Rice's novel: is Tom Cruise an acceptable Lestat? The answer is, sometimes. There are moments, and not isolated ones, where Cruise is positively fiendish, more so than one could have any right to hope. There are also moments when he is so completely wrong that every fear of his detractors appears to have been justified, and this schizophrenia is typical of the bumps in INTERVIEW. More damaging still is Brad Pitt, the real star of the film as Louis. He has said in interviews that he grew to hate playing the depressive vampire, and that fact is sadly evident in his performance, a dazed and lackluster turn. Both Pitt and Cruise are put to shame by eleven-year-old Kirsten Dunst, who does riveting work as the vampire who becomes a woman trapped in a child's body. She becomes the tortured soul whose plight truly connects with the audience in a way that Louis's should have, but never does.
Part of the problem is that among the elements of Rice's novel which are altered or abandoned, the one which is most ill-advised is ignoring Louis's religiosity. His despair is linked to a very Catholic sense of guilt, and when all reference to his faith is excised he loses a critical motivating factor. Often his reluctance to take human lives comes off as mere distaste, rather than a profound fear that he has become an agent of the devil, or that there may be no God to judge him.
Of course, this is one of the dangers inherent in doing a big Hollywood adaptation of what is essentially an interior monologue. Director Neil Jordan has filmed the story beautifully, busing Philippe Rousselot's cinematography to perfection, and scenes like the Theater of Vampires production are nearly ideal translations from the novel. The production design is magnificent, and Elliot Goldenthal's score is a great mood setter. It looks so good that occasionally I could overlook the fact that in their rush to pack as much plot as possible into two hours, Jordan and Rice had severely skimped on their characters' motivations. This is not to say that there haven't been some significant improvements made from the novel, particularly adding some much-needed black humor. But for INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE to work as anything besides simply spectacle, Louis had to becomes something besides a pouting immortal, and Lestat had to be something more than a sporadically zany eternal adolescent. Lestat is more like an abusive father, and that relationship is very poorly handled. INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE ends up positively gorgeous, and extremely hollow.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 vampires: 5.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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