Interview with the Vampire (1994) ****

 

Author Anne Rice died recently, so when I saw the movie adaptation of her first novel, “Interview with the Vampire,” on a streaming service, I figured it was time to re-watch it. I hadn't seen the film since it came out, when I was one of the pathetic, Rice-fan-boys picking the movie apart over how faithful it was to the book.

Brad Pitt plays Louis, a plantation owner lost in despair after losing his wife and daughter to illness. Louis spends his time drinking, gambling, and whoring, little caring what happens to him, and little knowing that he is being stalked by a vampire. When the vampire Lestat finally confronts Louis, he offers him the choice of a pleasant death or to join Lestat in dark immortality. Louis accepts the offer to become a vampire, a choice he quickly regrets. The hunger for blood, especially human blood, tortures Louis, who is too moral to sadistically hunt people the way Lestat does. With Louis's morality driving the pair apart, Lestat converts an 11-year-old girl into a vampire, to give Louis someone to care for, and to bind them all together as a warped, vampire family.

Lots of people in 1994, including Anne Rice, complained about the casting of the movie. A common refrain was that Tom Cruise has dark hair, while his character, Lestat, is described in the book as being blond. Wigs, people! It turns out that the casting was just perfect, Cruise's blond wig worked just fine, and director Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game”) does a masterful job capturing the spirit and the beauty of Rice's classic novel.

The themes are timeless. There is the Gothic family drama among Louis, Lestat, and Claudia. There's Lestat's struggle to survive immortality and adjust to a new era. There is Louis's moral misgivings over his blood hunger. Then, too, as terrible as the vampires' struggles are, every human who meets them begs them for the dark gift of vampirism. For humans, with our hearts pounding out our time for a limited number of beats, nothing, it seems, beats the dream of immortality.

4 stars out of 5