The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 227 Days to go: 232
Movie #150: Interview with the Vampire
Once again, we find ourselves at a movie adapted from a very popular book, in which book fans were severely disappointed and I, having tried and failed to ever get into the book, dug the film immensely. In fact, my appreciation for Interview with the Vampire only grows with time.
Kirsten Dunst is everything in this movie, and there’s not a soul on earth who will disagree with that. As child vampire Claudia, Dunst is delicate and doll-like, yet a vicious and unconscionable murderer. She embodies everything sweet and loving about a child, as well as everything selfish and temperamental, unable to process her complicated emotions and unwilling to delay gratification. She is a spoiled little princess and a terrifying monster. Her performance is riveting, hypnotic, intense. Her mood swings keep everyone on edge, from other characters in the film to the film’s audience themselves. Her pain and anger over never growing up, over forever being this porcelain doll, is heart-wrenching, and yet so, so scary. The vengeance she takes on Lestat (Tom Cruise) for damning her to this life is one of the more haunting things I’ve ever seen in a film, but it’s nothing — NOTHING — compared to the vengeance the Paris vampires take on Claudia. It’s no wonder her existence centers the film and that even though the story is technically about Louis (Brad Pitt) and his life as a vampire, it revolves totally around Claudia — her death, her rebirth, and her destruction.
I feel like Interview with the Vampire was a turning point for Brad Pitt’s career. He’d been working a long time, and he’d even had some starring roles at that time, in notable, interesting things like Cool World, Kalifornia and A River Runs Through It, but Interview with the Vampire (and Legends of the Fall, which came out maybe two months later) brought him to the big time — costarring with A-listers in big marquee films. None of that might’ve been possible without Interview.
The trick with playing Louis is that he’s got to be charismatic and sympathetic enough to carry the film, to be a narrator we care about, while also being the melancholy figure who so frustrates Lestat. (He’s not wrong when he accuses Louis of whining all the time.) It’s this balance of personality and sorrow that is so alluring and attractive to the interviewer (Christian Slater) while still failing to relay (perhaps by whining too much, and thereby being tuned out) what a damned existence it is. From the first moments in the interview room, to the first moments of the story, when Louis is still human and mourning his wife and child, he radiates sadness and loss. He is withdrawn and depressive, constantly in existential crisis yet resigned to it. And yet, his love — his raw NEED — for Claudia is almost tangible, it’s so strong. How else would he act but to indulge and spoil her, to grant her every wish? She’s everything to him, making her insistence on him creating a mother for her a huge betrayal, and her loss to the Paris vampires an unbearable pain. The cold, black hate with which he reaps his justice could not be stopped, could not be contained, could not have led to any other conclusion. And the ensuing offer from Armand (Antonio Banderas), to travel the world with him, as tempting as it may be, is untenable. He will retreat to his solitary sorrow, as he was perhaps always meant to live.
The most controversial casting choice of the film came in the form of Tom Cruise. Lestat was one of the most magnetic and beloved characters of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles books, and even though Tom Cruise — especially in the mid-90s — was certainly a magnetic and beloved actor, he wasn’t the right kind of magnetic or beloved. People complained about his intensity, his hair color, his general manic attack of all his roles — everything. But I think Tom Cruise makes a fascinating Lestat. In fact, his natural manic intensity is one of the things that makes Lestat so forceful and impatient in the film, so irresistible and so hated. He’s a ridiculous dandy, a snob, a commanding presence and a demanding patriarch. Perhaps it’s how his reputation and persona has evolved over the years, but all that feels like it aligns perfectly with Tom Cruise to me. I enjoy his transformation from powerful and menacing to impotent and terrified, and then back to smirkingly arrogant. And honestly, the scene with his reptilian skin as he becomes engulfed in flame and climbs the walls is burned on my brain. I think about it way more than probably any other human on earth, it was so horrific to me.
Interview with the Vampire is so interesting, too, because of the overtly sexual tone of the tale — and not just sexual, but homosexual. Lestat says he and Louis are Claudia’s fathers; she is their daughter. The drinking of blood, while often sexualized in vampire movies, is even more so in this one as blood is drained not just from necks but from breasts and wrists and fingers and lips and tongues (and likely other places too). Lestat has a clear affinity for young men or boys. Armand and Louis want each other openly. Claudia covets the bodies of supple, nubile women. And even though it is never sexualized, the relationship between Louis and Claudia blurs the lines between father-daughter and husband-wife. The complex and layered feelings the characters all have for one another gives the film greater depth, bigger obstacles and higher stakes, and allows for the gray areas that exist between extremes, and allows for characters and situations that are both right and wrong.
Back in December of 1993 I got my first introduction to the internet via talker clients where (mostly) college kids around the U.S. and U.K. adopted a persona and chatted endlessly online. I made friends in those digital environments, friends who merged into my real life and became huge pieces of me, of who I was then and of who I am now. A year after my first foray into that universe, a bunch of us met up for a weekend of parties and nerd fun. One such activity was going to see Interview with the Vampire on opening night. We took up a huge percentage of the theater, were somewhat rowdy before the movie started, and probably frightened more than a few other theater goers, but it’s one of those memories that I will fondly remember forever and another way I find I love Interview with the Vampire that most others don’t understand. I’m okay with that, though.
Viable Option 