The film tries its best to be taken seriously, but it comes off as part pretentious, pseudo, pop psychology and part parody.
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I love vampire flicks, all the way from the silent "Nosferatu" through Lugosi and Lee to "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "The Lost Boys." But I can't begin to tell you how tedious I found "Interview With the Vampire," despite my regard for its look, feel, costumes, sets, and atmosphere.
Adapting the screenplay from her best-selling novel, writer Anne Rice along with director Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game," "Michael Collins," "Mona Lisa") have concocted a kind of vampire soap opera and filled it with enough high-powered stars--Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas, Stephen Rea, Kirsten Dunst--to ensure a degree of success. The story is told in flashback as two-hundred-year-old vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Pitt) tells his life history to interviewer Daniel Malloy (Slater) in a seedy little apartment in San Francisco.
The first forty minutes are given over to Louis's seduction into the allures of vampirism by Lestat de Lioncourt (Cruise), an older and remarkably persuasive vampire. In 1791 Louis was a rich, young plantation owner in the Deep South before succumbing to the dark side. Once a vampire, he must be convinced of certain necessities like killing human victims and drinking their blood, which he steadfastly refuses to do, preferring rats instead. When he finally comes to accept who and what he is, however, he goes about his business with relish.
Louis's first human victim is a little girl named Claudia (Dunsten), who is subsequently turned into a vampire by Lestat. (It seems a vampire can turn anyone into a creature of the night by first sucking the person's blood and then combining it with his own.) Lestat, you see, is lonely and in order to make Louis stay with him, he gives him Claudia. She becomes the two male vampires' adopted "daughter" and, by implication, Louis's lover. (Like most vampire movies, this one doesn't openly explore the sex lives of the creatures, but it's clear that sucking blood is exhilarating in more ways than one. Later in the story, another vampire, Armand (Banderas), is seen to have a young boy vampire in tow, so I guess these creatures are not so different from humans in the diversity of their preferences.)
Anyway, because they never age, the world grows old around them, and before more than a few decades have come and gone the happy little family members are at each other's throats, literally. Claudia gets ticked off not being able to grow up and become a real woman, blames Lestat for her condition, and winds up slitting his jugular. Not to worry; vampires are resilient. Temporarily left to themselves, Louis and Claudia seek their roots in the Old World, going to Paris and joining up with a whole tribe of blood suckers led by Armand, supposedly the oldest living vampire on earth. The group earns its keep by performing in theater, pretending to be humans playing at being vampires. That's a cute twist. All of this goes on without end until we reach the present, where the interviewer gets more than he bargained for in one of the dumbest endings in recent cinema.
The film tries its best to be taken seriously, but it comes off as part pretentious, pseudo, pop psychology and part parody. Yes, parody. I mean, how else can one interpret bits like the little girl being told not to play with her food or the girl's demand that she be given her own little coffin in sleep in or the trio devouring whole families of humans at a single meal? Is that Mel Brooks smiling in the wings? As far as the psychology is concerned, do we really need a two-hour treatise on the ethos and animus of vampirism? It rather takes the fun out of the proceedings, you know?
Ultimately, the movie fails to achieve what it strives so hard for--to make us feel any sympathy whatsoever for Louis. We may pity him, yes, but we cannot be sympathetic. The situation is not helped by everyone speaking in an exaggerated, overly precise, stylized, and hugely melodramatic manner that makes them all sound too unreal to worry about. Worse, we are given absolutely no one else in the film to care about, either. The vampires are the only characters in the plot, the humans mere fodder, and these beasts are cold-blooded murderers who have no concept of right or wrong. How can we feel for them?
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[release]4506[/release]