11/02/10 - Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994, 123 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110148/

This was a leftover movie from Thriller October and I decided to use it to start November. I didn't really have high expectations for this movie but for some reason Criticker was saying I would give it a high score so I entered with confused expectations.

The film follows Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) as he chronicles his life as a vampire to the writer Daniel Malloy (Christian Slater). Figuring prominently in the narrative are Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise), the person that made Louis into a vampire and Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), a girl that the duo turn into a vampire and then essentially adopt. Figuring less prominently but still important is the Parisian vampire Armand (Antonio Banderas).

I felt like this movie's biggest problem was his adaptation to the big screen. I felt like many times I was left wondering or confused on a certain point, but with the impression that this question was answered in the original novel. It's hard to fault a movie for not living up to it's novel since not every movie comes from an original source, but I can say that I felt like it was jumpy and disoriented at times. Similarly, I never felt that attached to the main group of Louis, Lestat, or Claudia. I again get the impression that the written word was able to convey more than these visual images were able to do. But really this is also something worth really criticizing the movie for: I didn't care about any of the main characters. Louis always just seemed confused and I guess even somewhat a wimp; Lestat was over-the-top and I guess it worked, but he also seemed too impassioned at times and whimsical as he changed motives and plans and for this I never got attached to him; and Claudia has a failed character arc in my opinion as I got the impression I'm supposed to feel bad for her as she's stuck being a child but I never did.

So, besides this colossal failure in making me really not care what the main group is doing, there has to be some positives to this movie, right? Well, certainly one of those is the costumes and settings. They're lavish and ornate but they work extremely well with the mood of the story. The highly sexual nature of the movie clashes with the New Orleans setting of the late 1700s for all the right reasons. Once the movie moves to Paris, the settings here work as well. The dungeon where Armand and his group reside is daunting and equally fitting for a vampire ruler (or whatever he is). Anyway, I was never taken out of the movie by anything that I was seeing around the characters so that's a plus.

Next, two other things are worth mentioning: acting and dialogue. First, the acting is pretty good for what everyone's given. Dunst is spectacular here as she's really young and shows considerable talent. I said above I didn't really like her character arc but that doesn't take away that she tries to sell it with all her effort. Similarly, Cruise is a standout as Lestat. This was back when Cruise was actually a good actor as opposed to the goofball he is today. Anyway, his character works and it really works well with the Cruise persona from the early 1990s which adds a little bit. Pitt's Louis is okay but the character is so mopey and dejected all the time that he has few times where he can really excel at his acting. He does an okay job with what he was given but I just didn't feel like that was much. Finally, the dialogue in this movie is pretty bad. It's over-the-top and just way too romanticized. I again get the impression that it works very well in written form but as a movie it just falters - though I'm not actually sure the dialogue for lines was taken directly from the text or not. Anyway, I sometimes did find myself questioning why these people or vampires were saying such stupid stuff and that hurts the movie experience.

Overall, I gave this film a 3/10. I was really disappointed here as hardly anything really impressed me besides the costumes and settings. The vampire story was pretty boring and I never felt drawn in to the twisting story of Louis and Lestat.