Vampire Sociology

Rating: 7/10 (15 August 2006)

Brokeback Mountain is said to be the ultimate exam of viewers' homophobia, but before everybody that's straight heads out to test their endurance with that film, I think Interview with the Vampire is keeping the throne warm for now. There technically isn't anything sexual in Interview, but author and screenplay adapter Anne Rice does a fine job establishing the "bisexual in nature" sociology of the vampires and how it compares with the mortals. Goes like this: the vampires cannot be sexual (all of one's body is dead, so... use your imagination), but when they quench their thirsts for blood on their victims, male or female, the thrills they achieve are so exhilarating that the act is comparable to sex. Once the viewer understands this, with some parts of the movie, it's hard to decide whether to be disgusted or not, not with the near homosexual relationship between Tom Cruise's Lestat and Brad Pitt's Louis (which is acceptable) but with Louis' little girl companion, in a pedophiliac sense. Kirsten Dunst, who was about 11, gives (still) the best performance of her career as Claudia, an aging vampire whose physical form stays childlike. However, since Claudia becomes adult and beyond and tries to do away with Lestat so Louis can be all hers, it's hard to watch what still seems to be a child to the naked eye grow so lovelorn for an adult. Their relationship raises tons of questions, some you may not want the answers to. My favorite scenes (tie) are toward the end when Louis seeks fiery revenge on some misled vampires in the name of Claudia and the edgy dialogue and body language exchanged between Louis and Armand (Antonio Banderas, fresh off playing Tom Hanks' lover in Philadelphia) in the scene after. My beef with the movie is not homophobic by any means. I just don't like getting beat over the head repeatedly for a point to be made, and casting all "pretty boys" like Cruise, Pitt, Banderas, and Christian Slater as the current-day interviewer is doing just that (though it's really the only case of it). Other than Pitt, I wish the casting director would have chosen the parts by acting ability and not by shock value.