_Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles_
                     reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs


     Lush. This is an extravagantly lush film, almost vibrating with some
dense, languid imagery and slow pacing. The eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and
twentieth-century sets occupied by its tortured vampiric souls are
dramatically designed, lit, and effected; the pretty male vampires all
have long hair that blows over their faces, forever untangled; and the
interview wherein reluctant vampire Louis (Brad Pitt) tells his tale to a
rapt interlocutor (Christian Slater) provides an elaborate and
time-consuming (and convenient) frame for narrating the enduring conflict
of Good and Evil. 

     That the Good is represented by Louis' lingering "human'' sense of
morality and the Bad by the amoral vampire LeStat (Tom Cruise) is no
surprise: humans are the resistant victims and independent thinkers in
most horror stories, while monsters are crafty, but essentially
too-ambitious and out of control. As a vampire movie must, this one
investigates pathology as a "lifestyle,'' by granting some moral ground to
undeadness: Louis' continually voiced anxieties about his eternal deviance
from whatever social norm he once inhabited (as a slave-owning, wealthy
whiteguy: observe that the distinctions between normal and abnormal are
somewhat complicated) center on the death thing. He doesn't want to have
to suck life from others in order to stay undead, so he resorts to sucking
blood from rats and poodles for a brief period, a morally-vested diversion
that proves unsatisfying. 

     The film's more interesting dilemma comes around when the connection
- rather than the difference, which becomes increasingly untenable -
between life and death is linked (more or less) explicitly to sexuality.
Anne Rice's novels are famous for their intriguingly baroque detailing of
the human-demon conflict through sex, which is, of course, where humans
tend to have trouble maintaining their moral equilibrium. In her work, the
sex is not as tame or repressed as it is in many mass-market versions of
_Dracula_, but ardent, complicated, and overtly lustful: her vampires
are campy, convoluted creatures, tortured but also quite lovely,
morbid, splendidly seductive and wildly metaphorical. 

     Directed by Neil Jordan, with special effects by James Cameron's
Digital Domain and "special vampire effects'' designed by the
irrepressibly inventive Stan Winston, the film is gorgeous to look at,
full of dark corners, fiends who can walk on walls (recalling Fred Astaire
in _Royal Wedding_, among others), desperately hungry victims, and
occasional explosive moments, mostly having to do with buildings burning
down (these might be read as requisite "action'' sequences). LeStat and
his chosen companion Louis (who has lost his wife and child in 1791, and
like a good tragic hero craves oblivion) eventually find little comfort in
the luxuries of the latter's spookily outfitted estate; meanwhile the
slaves stage elaborate voodoo rituals, a requisite display of "exoticism''
that marks the film's tediously regular, _Angel Heart_-ish interest in
cultural "otherness'' (all the vampires are white and seemingly
well-to-do). 
 
    This fascination with darkness, literally and figuratively, moves
_Interview_'s plot. Given Jordan's previous work, say, _Mona Lisa_
and _The Crying Game_, this film's rather simplistic manipulations of
the connections among race, class, gender, and sexuality are not
surprising; they originate from a (for lack of a better term)
white-straight-male sensibility, wherein blackness and queerness are
deemed "strange.'' Still, the cynical interviewer is clearly seduced by
Louis' tale, and we are meant to follow suit, in whatever fashion may be
available to us. As Cruise told an MTV interviewer, "If you're homosexual,
you're gonna look at this movie and think it's, you know, homoerotic.''

     You know. The movie's capitulations to an assumed mass audience are
generally manifest in its "exotic'' displays, and in its reliance on the
pop-iconicity of Pitt and Cruise to make its androgynous, bisexual
vampires more conventionally, or at least visually, straight. This
uneasiness over racial difference is made plain when Louis' first human
conquest is his mulatto slave-housekeeper: when he exhibits her body to
the rest of his astonished slaves, he proclaims his house "damned,'' not
quite able to name his own responsibility (sounding like dominant U.S.
historical accounts of slavery as a bad, bad - and very past - time). 
   
  The movie has been reclaimed by screenwriter Rice, who could hardly miss
the sequel-city signs all over this installment. If at first she was
loudly upset at the casting of Cruise (he was "too mom and apple pie''),
her recent _Variety_ and _New York Times_ public notices welcomed
her fans (who are legion) back to the fold, encouraging them to see the
film and anticipate more to come. The cynical read on her reversal is that
she saw the light of assured big box office returns. But here's the
surprise: the thing itself is worth seeing. 

     This is not to say that the film is necessarily "good,'' that it
translates the novel in any kind of comprehensible terms, or even that it
manages conspicuous or politically progressive subversions. To be generous
for a minute, such banal measures of worth don't really get at how the
film works, especially given its situation in the currently
re-Republicanized U.S. Its incoherence is to its credit in this context,
where strictly linear storylines and nuclear families are all the rage;
its transgressions are incomplete but compelling. The queerness of
_Interview_ is not so much a matter of gay vampire-boys gesturing
toward sex-on-screen (though there is that), but more a matter of its
inability to keep its own narrative veneer "straight'' (in all senses). 

     The film shies away from the explicit queerness of Rice's novels, so
that the attraction between LeStat and Louis, and later Louis and Armand
(Antonio Banderas) is barely covered over by descriptive terms like
"companion'' and "friend.'' Or rather, it displaces sexuality onto scenes
of titillating violence, as when LeStat "makes'' Louis: the heavy
breathing and pulsating exchange of fluids are pretty thin disguises for
the sexual desire they never seem to consummate. Their status as social
outcasts makes their metaphorical possibilities extremely clear; I suppose
there are viewers who might be able to hold Louis and LeStat to het
standards, but such a reading would be working against the grain of what
we see (this would be sort of the inverse of the situation with the
dreamier _Fried Green Tomatoes_, for example, where lesbianism was a
possibility, but physicality was less available, visually or viscerally).
Louis' encounter with Armand offers the closest thing to an onscreen gay
kiss that _Interview_ can imagine: it's a major tease, these pretty
faces hovering so close to one another and at last turning away with
near-palpable pain and frustration. 

     And then there's the Tom Cruise factor: if Pitt embodies a langorous,
periodically tedious angst (the existentialist vampire) and Banderas
alludes to his role as Tom Hanks' lover in _Philadelphia_, Cruise can
be stiff (pun intended) and clench-jawed. He is especially wooden during
his later stages of heinous ugliness, where his perennial
flyboy-Tomcruiseness is buried under some heavy Cryptkeeper makeup. (And
let's just recognize upfront that _Top Gun_ is a homoerotic text.) He
also has some ripping good moments, and almost all the film's erotic
jokes, which he delivers with entertaining verve. 

     (A few of these jokes seem rather "inside'': for example, when he's
locked away in a present-day New Orleans hideaway and a helicopter comes
by the window, searchlight blazing through the night sky: he cowers and
cries, suggesting for an instant that Ron Kovic might be rising again,
still haunted by the specter of all those homophobic-homophilic Vietnam
movies.) Cruise's performance seems to look forward to another movie,
tantalizing in the possibilities of what he doesn't quite show us here.
Maybe that's appropriate, as it leaves you wanting more. 

     The character who incarnates the film's more specific queer sexuality
is the young-girl- vampire "made'' by LeStat in an effort to sustain
Louis' interest. Tired of rat-blood, Louis wanders the plague-ridden
streets and finds Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), huddled beside her dead mother.
He bites her, thinking it an act of pity to put her out of her misery, but
can't complete the job. Along comes LeStat, who also doesn't finish the
job, but brings her home and feeds her his blood, transforming her into
one of them, a cheery gift for the dispirited Louis (LeStat has an
appealingly depraved sense of humor). They form a particularly odd and
quite charming family unit, two dads and this doll-faced child of the 
night, all driven by insatiable appetites. 

     Dunst gives a stunning performance: her golden-locked Claudia is
emotionally kinky, naive and ravenous, stubborn and hilariously devious.
Whereas Louis is, as LeStat observes, perpetually "whining,'' she's got
some serious spunk, more than able to match wits and perversions with the
boys. And she's surrounded by them. Her relationships with them are
alternately creepy and thrilling, laced through with a child-sexuality
that isn't often acknowledged in R-rated movie imagery. While Louis and
LeStat call themselves her "parents,'' it's clear enough (if you pay
attention) that she's also their lover and sister. 

     A few hundred years after her initiation into the vamp-club, Claudia
is consumed with rage at the limitations this entails. This rage is coded
- for the film's presumed audience - as her anger at not being able to
"grow up.'' While the dialogue obscures why she might want to age, the
imagery is clear: she spots a dark-skinned whore and lusts after her
lucious body, her capacity for sensual pleasure and seduction. When
Claudia brings the woman home (dead) and keeps her corpse hidden under her
pile of dolls, both LeStat and Louis are horrified, for very different
reasons. Where Louis is apparently appalled that she would kill someone
and keep the body as a souvenir, LeStat is more concerned with the stench
in her bedroom and maintaining vampire decorum. 

     The point of Claudia's intense sexual desire is not lost here (even
if the film is afraid to confront it directly): she wants to be this woman
but also to "have'' her. Her baby-dykeness is later mediated again, as she
finds a woman willing to serve as her "mother'' (a woman who has recently
lost her own child, and like Louis before her, imagines undeadness as a
way to be both punished and empowered). The appearance of another (female)
parent tears it for the possessive Louis. He and Claudia have by then
broken with LeStat, so Louis' incestuous relationship with his "daughter''
has been made fairly clear (they sleep in the same coffin for a time, and
she repeatedly expresses her undying love for him). His passivity allows
him to pass for human (read: straight), but his yearning remains quite
visceral, symbolized by (or carried by) the girl's queerly innocent
voraciousness. 


Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.