Picture it: 1994. The Northridge earthquake happened, gas was $1.40 per gallon. Brad Pitt was a young heartthrob fresh out of Kalifornia and about to grace the screen with Legends of the Fall. Tom Cruise was famous from A Few Good Men, and was the other heartthrob that teenaged girls dreamed about. Christian Slater wasn't yet irrelevant. Kirsten Dunst was 12 years old, pure and cute as a button and not yet the strange sad-eyed hipster of modern occurrence. When Interview with the Vampire came out, it was like pornography for women. Here were all these sexy, long-haired stallions pouting their lips and seducing women, baring their teeth and flashing their unnaturally blue eyes at us all. Anne Rice was exceedingly popular; it was Twilight for the older generations. This was one of the biggest films to open that year, and a slight controversy only added to its intrigue.
Fast-forward 15 years. I am sitting alone in my bedroom, procrastinating a little bit, and remembering my decade-old fondness for this film, which is available to view instantly on Netflix. I imagined that it would be fun and possibly humorous to revisit such a relic from the mid-90's. I was not prepared to be slightly bored and uncomfortable with the deliberateness and seriousness of this film. Director Neil Jordan clearly took great pains to make this film what it is, and while it's not entirely awful, it is very much a film for the time, and does not translate well to today's standard and aesthetic.
For those unfamiliar, or those who have simply forgotten, the plot follows Louis Pointe du Lac (Brad) as he wallows in misery from mortality to immortality. Because he is a childless widower, he feels he has no reason to live, which is apparently perfect for vampire makin'. The vampire, Lestat (Cruise), picks him up and sucks him dry, and then the two of them live in devilish abandon in Louis's giant plantation house in New Orleans through much of the 19th century. They grow to hate each other because Louis, apparently, didn't realize what vampires do, and he has a crisis of conscience over killing people. Lestat is just, like, whatever, and bites prostitutes in the breast and kills them that way. (I'm sure you remember that scene. It certainly made an impression on me.) Their intense hatred for each other drives them to collectively vampirize the young and motherless plague victim, Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), who is a source of further sexual and non-sexual tension between all of them because it just wouldn't be a movie without it.
Claudia and Louis, whose love affair is hardly portrayed on film (as Dunst was 12 years old when the film is made), scheme to free themselves of Lestat, whose main flaw appears to be that he is just too vampirish. Feeds on human flesh, breaks things. Louis and Claudia are more subdued, but at that point, Louis has reconciled himself to the inevitability of murder for survival, and Claudia is a good little vampire who lures in adults with her childlike wiles. They commit the ultimate crime, vampiricide, and leave the charred remains of Lestat behind in New Orleans as they take off for Europe to find more of their kind. And in the hundred or so years that they spend scouring the continent, they realize that their kind is just like Lestat. I won't reveal the end, but it is incendiary.
It's very difficult not to be tongue-in-cheek about this. It is absolutely not a terrible movie, not at all, but it's excessively melodramatic. The visuals are lovely. There is a rich darkness about the film that Neil Jordan was careful to preserve from the source material, and it is very appropriate for the tone. But it is quite absurd. There is a gravity to everything that happens, a complete and utter humorlessness about it all, that it's laughable. Such a snapshot of mid-90's male cheesecake cannot but be hilarious. Reading the IMDb trivia, and seeing the other actors that were in consideration for Lestat and Louis's roles (Rutger Hauer! Johnny Depp! Julian Sands!) just completes the snapshot of what this film was going for.
The most interesting component of this film is definitely Louis and Claudia's relationship. Because laws are what they are, as previously mentioned, there is nothing portrayed between them, only heavily insinuated. But even then, it's glossed over very lightly as though the filmmakers didn't want to suggest too definitively that there is a relationship between an adult man and a girl child, even though in the context of the film, the girl child is about one hundred years old. Kirsten Dunst was easily the best part of this film, as she appears to be world-weary and jaded, and yet youthfully bratty. It would be difficult for a film to explore the motivations for Louis and Claudia to explore romance together without it being either painfully pretentious or blunt, pandering to the lowest common denominator and insulting my intelligence. But it has the potential to be so intriguing. I'd even read the book if I liked Anne Rice's style at all.
If I had been watching this with someone else who felt the same way I did, I'd probably have a great time giggling about the pedantic dialogue, the cheapness of the vampire-teeth dentures that make the actors talk like their mouths are full, and the absurdity of the casting. But I watched it alone, over the course of three or four days, and I did not have a particularly good time, except when I could laugh about it afterward with the friends of mine who'd seen it relatively recently. Standards of beauty have changed, as has public opinion of Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst, so seeing them as the paragons of beauty, sexuality and purity no longer works. I remember my mindset when I first watched it, and I remember why I liked it. Unfortunately, it is no longer enjoyable, since it took itself far too seriously at the time that it was made. A little levity next time, folks!
