Video Nasty with Pretensions

Rating: 4/10 (20 November 2009)

Vampires don't give interviews. At least, vampires in their traditional Transylvanian form don't. Imagine Count Dracula in one of those old Hammer horrors going off to hold a press conference with someone from the Daily Mail or the BBC. The title of "Interview with the Vampire", therefore, suggests that it will be a vampire story with a modern setting, perhaps something like "The Hunger".
In fact, although the film opens in modern-day San Francisco, it is not as modern as its title might suggest. It starts with a man named Louis being interviewed by a reporter named Daniel Malloy. Louis claims to have been born in Louisiana in the late eighteenth century and to have been converted to vampirism by the vampire Lestat in 1791. The film then chronicles the adventures of Louis, Lestat and a young girl named Claudia, whom they also transform into a vampire, over the next two centuries, starting in the New Orleans of the 1790s, passing through the Paris of the 1870s and ending up in the America of the late twentieth century.
In the course of the film we learn several interesting facts about vampires. They are, apparently, ageless, and remain the age they were when the first became a vampire. Thus Claudia still has the outward appearance of an nine-year-old girl even when, by rights, she should be in her eighties, and Louis looks remarkably well preserved for a two-hundred-and-twentysomething. "Ageless", however, does not necessarily mean "immortal", and there are in fact various ways of killing them besides the traditional stake-though-the-heart method, notably exposing them to direct sunlight. We also learn that vampires need blood to survive; animal blood will do, but they far prefer human blood. Louis (much to Lestat's contempt) initially has a conscience about killing humans, but eventually gives in and kills his housemaid. As for Claudia, she is a bloodthirsty little monster from the start.
There is another difference between "Interview with the Vampire" and those old Hammer films, quite apart from its protagonist's willingness to speak to the press. Hammer films had their faults, but at least they had a strong sense of morality. The vampires were the bad guys and those humans like Van Helsing who were brave enough to stand up to them were the good guys. There is none of that in "Interview". Humans do not really play much part in the story, except as victims. Apart from Louis' brief struggle with his conscience, morals do not play much of a role either. Vampires kill humans, and that is that. It is this very amorality which is the reason why (or, more precisely, one of the reasons why) this film is so difficult to like. Certainly, the vampires suffer from enough emotional angst to keep a regiment of agony aunts busy on a full-time basis, but it is hard to sympathise with the emotional problems of creatures who regard the entire human race simply as a convenient source of tasty nourishment.
Rather surprisingly, the best acting comes from the then child star Kirsten Dunst, twelve at the time of filming, who gives a very mature and assured performance as Claudia. Indeed, it was a much more mature and adult performance than many of those which Kirsten has given since she became an adult- and certainly better than those given by her adult co-stars in this film.
For someone regarded as one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Brad Pitt has appeared in a depressingly large number of indifferent or downright bad films ("A River Runs Through It", "The Devil's Own", "Ocean's Twelve", "Mr and Mrs Smith", etc). "Interview with the Vampire" is another to add to this catalogue, although I have to say that he was better here than Tom Cruise, an actor whose acting varies even more alarmingly between the sublime, the adequate and the ridiculous. Cruise's hilariously over-the-top performance as Lestat must count as one of his worst. The script is generally pretty cheesy, but it is normally Cruise who gets the purest specimens of over-ripe Gorgonzola. ("Whining coward of a vampire that prowls the night killing rats and poodles; you could have finished us both"). To describe this sort of dialogue as melodramatic would be to wrong the writers of melodramas.
Indeed, there is much about the whole film that could be described as hilariously over the top. Like a number of other reviewers I was struck by the obvious homo-erotic overtones to the relationship between Louis and Lestat, especially as Tom Cruise seemed to be doing his best to milk this aspect as much as he could. More disturbing were the overtones to the relationship between Louis and Claudia. Their feelings for one another seemed to verge on paedophilia, and the mutual dislike between Claudia and Lestat to be rooted in sexual jealousy.
The tone of the entire film is one of swooningly camp Grand Guignol, with blood being spilt by the bucketful. The worst, and silliest, part came during the scenes set in Paris, where Louis and Claudia come across a coven of theatrical vampires who specialise in dispatching their human victims under cover of a theatrical performance, without any of their audience realising what is going on. It was at this point that I realised that, for all Neil Jordan's arty direction, the film had abandoned any claim to be taken seriously and had turned into little more than a video nasty with pretensions. 4/10