Finding out that uber cool Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston were starring in Only Lovers Left Alive was all the incentive I needed to go see this movie. That these two such otherworldly actors were playing vampires was just icing on the cake.
Okay so, this is the story of Adam and Eve. No, not that Adam and Eve, this pair is of the undead variety, living on separate continents and facing some serious issues. Adam is a brilliant underground musician who’s totally reclusive, vaguely suicidal, and living in an extra dilapidated section of Detroit. When his wife Eve, who has a surprisingly sunny disposition for a nosferatu, realizes he’s in a dangerously deep depression, she abandons her own decaying metropolis of Tangier to go help him out. Their sweet, passionate reunion is soon overshadowed, however, by the ominous news that Eve’s troublesome, unpredictable younger sister (Mia Wasikowska) is on her way, and likely to wreak havoc.
The good news is Swinton and Hiddleston (and the supporting cast, for that matter) carry the film with all the sophistication and refinement that one might expect of them. Despite seemingly infinite wealth, their characters each choose to live amidst urban decay. They dress like rock stars, they’ve rubbed elbows with all the long-dead (and one undead) literary greats, their musical taste is groovily eclectic, and their intellectual prowess is immense. All of this creates introductory scenes that are smooth and cool and mysterious and full of the promise that something really epic is going to happen here.
I kept trying to guess where it was heading. They made a lot of references to humans’ increasingly contaminated blood and the planet’s dwindling natural resources, and their names are Adam and Eve -- are they planning to repopulate the world with vampires after some sort of apocalypse? They speak of Einstein and the theory of entanglement -- are they going to enlighten us with a new spin on some old properties of physics? Are they going to reveal some secret to life and existence that we raggedy, ignorant humans have missed?
No idea. Sadly, the story never truly goes anywhere, so they sort of just leave us hanging. Instead of developing a carefully constructed screenplay that creates some sort of a disturbing crescendo or reveals some great insight into the human condition, it’s like someone has just hurled handfuls of literary, cultural, scientific and historical references at the screen to see what would stick. And what we’re left with is a messy spaghetti pile of intention, but no real sense of purpose, other than to tell us mankind is doomed. Well, duh.
It’s a shame because it truly is beautifully shot, the soundtrack is great, the premise is interesting, the characters and cast are intriguing… but it just winds up being a disappointing case of style over substance. What a waste.
Only Lovers Left Alive opens in New Orleans at The Theatres at Canal Place and AMC Elmwood 20 on May 9.
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