highly underneglected

Rating: Null/10 (5 February 2014)

Tom Cruise seemed almost a natural to play Lestat in Interview With the Vampire. The locations were excellent, the late-18th-century set design superb, and the cinematography competent.
But director Neil Jordan seemed at a loss for ways to give the plot primacy. As a result, Cruise and Pitt had to distract the viewer from the film's substance deficit by playing up their screen presences. The former, unfortunately, overshadowed the latter beyond what the script required.
It's as though Jordan, who has done very creditable work on films that dealt with his native Ireland (The Crying Game, Michael Collins), let Louisiana languor swamp his direction. Jordan recognized that he'd gone about things in an "unconscious" way (see his IMDb bio). His interpretation remolded, circumscribed, and sometimes denatured the seamless world into which scenarist and author Anne Rice had long lured her readers. The film, Jordan said, "seemed to me to be about guilt."
Viewers who had read Rice's novel by the same name may find it hard to believe that she had much of a hand in the final product. Still, as vampire films go, this one is truer to the literary genre than most. But judging by my stubbornly wandering thoughts, it did not work.
To hazard a hypothesis: Sensing that Jordan was adrift, Cruise commandeered directorial and authorial control. And ultimately he sapped the film's vitality by diverting and squandering its essence.