Movie No. 6 of 2014 — Only Lovers Left Alive
Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as vampire lovers! What could go wrong? Quite a bit, it seems.
Jim Jarmusch isn’t one of those directors who is widely known. He’s made his name in American independant cinema, and has managed to stay in that creative realm. His films tend to bear certain hallmarks: sparse dialogue, atmospheric settings, emphasis on mood instead of narrative. So the phrase “Jim Jarmusch Vampire Movie” almost sounds like the title of a Saturday Night Live sketch, or something the Netflix Genre Generator might cough up. Only Lovers Left Alive has the dubious honour of being an actual Jim Jarmusch movie about vampires, and it sure wears all of Jarmusch’s cinematic trademarks on its faded velvet sleeve.
The film takes shuttled between Detroit and Tangiers, and follows the story of a pair of vampire lovers named Eve and Adam (Yes, those are their names. So much for subtext, Jim). They are respecitively played by Tilda Swinton, with her androgynous face that hasn’t aged since she turned 30, and Tom Hiddleston, a capable character actor blessed with leading-man looks. They are supported by John Hurt (as an elder vampire of sorts), Mia Wasikowska (Eve’s younger sister Eva, who is also a vampire), and Anton Yelchin (a stoner dude whom Adam generously pays to go out and get him stuff). This is casting which seems to work on paper, but doesn’t quite live up to expectation.
The fault must be placed on Jarmusch’s script, which suffers from an anaemic lack of characterisation. Adam is a vampire bored with (eternal) life, angry at humans for “polluting” our blood (with what, it is never clearly said, but we assume it is a combination of fast food and nicotine), and thus severely limiting his supply of “the good stuff” (his supplier is an uptight medical doctor played by an excellent Jeffrey Wright, whose character, sadly, doesn’t really matter to this film at all). He holes up in an abandoned Victorian wreck outside of Detroit, recording funereal glam rock on an ancient tape machine. He wants to kill himself , but seems too apathetic to pull the trigger. And when Eve flies in from Tangiers to cheer him up, her younger sister suddenly shows up, and then the slow-paced drama reluctantly shuffles along.
Jarmusch is happy to have them pout and lounge about, while revealing little about their past lives. Also, despite what promotional materials (and previous acting ability) suggest, there is a lack of palpable chemistry between the leads. While their scenes are well-performed, they lack a little something that might have made it genuinely genuine.
And the dialogue here isn’t just sparse; it borders on the pretentious. Adam and Even use double-barreled scientific names to describe the mushrooms they spot, the wild dogs they stumble across, and even the wood used to make Adam’s guitars. They drive round nocturnal Detroit, gazing at the industrial rot while casually talking about urban depopulation and Einstein’s formulation of paradoxical quantum entanglement— in other words, nothing in particular.
To be fair, there are some interesting ideas floated here: that vampires are the ones behind artistic triumphs of the Western world. Jarmusch is at least clever enough not to build a full narrative from this — such conspiracy theories are perhaps more effective as a ghost of a suggestion. Vampirism is portrayed here as an addiction — Jarmusch gives us close-ups of their euphoric bliss after they down a shot of blood, all while Adam’s self-composed tracks wail in the background.
One wonders if the foibles of Adam and Eve are simply drawn from Jarmusch’s own eccentricities: a refusal to get out of bed every morning (well, in the case of vampires, every sundown), a muted dislike of airplane travel, and an odd variant of techno-nostalgia that is impossibly ironic (Adam manages to Skype with Eve’s iPhone on an CRT television screen. It’s a humourously weird reversal of Spike Jonze’s Her.).
I am slightly baffled by generally positive critical response: perhaps they are true Jarmusch devotees, having grown up in the early 80s and 90s with his independent films. Perhaps they have grown ravenously hungry for another grown-up exploration of the vampire myth. (After what Twilight did, who can blame them?) Whatever the reason, their enthusiasm eludes me.
The praiseworthy part of this film, happily, is its final scene. We watch Adam and Eve finally embracing their vampiric nature, and the sequence, as it plays out, is a wry and smart reflection on the film’s title. What we are left with, at the end, is (perhaps) Jarmusch’s own riff on the vampire trope. Eternal life is going to be repetitive and boring. Why bother? Just turn off the lights (in this cinema) and let me take a nap.
