Farewell to the sunrise...

Rating: 6/10 (16 September 2006)

Neil Jordan's movie-version of Anne Rice's celebrated novel, which she adapted for the screen, might have skirted disaster with boyish, all-American Tom Cruise cast as the cunning vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. But Cruise acquits himself admirably in the role: not a towering figure of evil, nor even a dark, imposing force, Cruise's Lestat is a devious trickster, a child-demon, and this sort of wicked decadence works well for Cruise. In 1790's New Orleans, a young widower (Brad Pitt) is picked by Lestat as a companion of sorts (it's never made clear, but apparently vampires feel the need to pass on to others what was initially done to them); bitten twice, Pitt's Louis is given the choice to die or to go on as part of the undead. Though the film is handsome and well-wrought, with mordant passages of dark humor and blood-soaked, cringe-worthy carnage, it does exist on mostly one note (which extends through to the tepid finale). The hunt for human victims can only stretch so far before the picture falls into a wryly bleak, downtrodden rut (these are not foppish or cackling vampires by any means). As Louis, Pitt doesn't fare quite as well as Cruise; playing a morally grounded man who chased death and got captured, Pitt's good ol' boy persona isn't completely overshadowed, and his shallow qualities as an actor in general don't quite mesh with this more-or-less complicated character. Cruise, however, is surprisingly nimble and skilled; his angular frame has seldom been this graceful, and he manages to make Lestat a lithe, sensuous prankster. **1/2 from ****