Director: Jim Jarmusch
Writer: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Anton Yelchin, Mia Wasikowska, Jeffrey Wright, Slimane Dazi, John Hurt
Runtime: 123 mins.
2013
Only Lovers Left Alive states its intent immediately. The needle drops on a record and the camera spins out into a lugubrious montage of two extremely stylish ethereal beings. They languish as the camera rotates above them, and the turntable pours out arabic-gothic-psychedelic rock. Nothing happens but tone and style, and this is what we should expect from the rest of the two+ hour runtime. You could call this a hang out movie, but generally hang outs imply events. By the time our characters actually get out for a low key night on the town, it feels like a dangerous cascade of activity.
This is the story of two undead beings, traversers of centuries, patrons of the arts, setters of trends, hermits, blood addicts, strung-out has-beens, powerful intellects the likes of which the world cannot acknowledge. They are wreathed in the loneliness of immortality. When Only Lovers Left Alive is at its best, it explores the psychology of how a half-millennium old vampire might experience twenty-first century culture and society. Its abnormal pacing invites us to warp and stretch our sense of time to scale. Unfortunately, this is only part of the film. The other part is a ceaseless parade of cheeky references.
The dialogue is obsessed with referentiality to the point of becoming obnoxious. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) gets his blood by going to a local hospital dressed as a doctor with the nametag "Dr. Faust." Eve (Tilda Swinton) asks Adam what it was like to hang out with Mary Wollstonecraft. She begs Adam to tell her more about Einstein's theory of entanglement. When traveling she stuffs suitcases full of books in a prolonged montage of Cultured References. There's even a whole subplot about a vampire Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt) who secretly penned the works of William Shakespeare. I get that all this is part of the point. The longer you go on living, the more your reality becomes a tapestry of references and allusions and remixes of what has come before. In practice, for every compelling monologue about the great scientists of history who have been punished by the ignorant, there are two or three do-nothing references that amount to an act of mental masturbation.
For all that painstaking effort to appear cultured, the movie features a scene blocked around Adam and Eve (ugh) playing chess, and it couldn't even be bothered to research a decent chess piece board state for the scene's purposes. They act like they are locked in a tight battle, but judging by the board Adam has lost the game long ago and is giving up pieces willy-nilly. This is supposed to be two ancient beings engaging each other in a centuries' old battlefield of strategy, not a couple of dopey kids at an after-school chess club.
I make a point of roasting the lazy chess scene because it is a pet peeve of mine (obviously), but also because the rest of the film is such a cornucopia of hyperspecific details. An early scene sees Adam's plug Ian (Anton Yelchin) revealing to him a series of classic guitars, electric and acoustic. I don't know much about music, I have no idea why Ian's descriptions are so desirable, but I can feel the resonance of the artifact under the collector's eye as Adam scrutinizes each guitar, handling it with deference. Adam is a bit of a packrat, you see, and his old Detroit home is a maze of records, wires, amps, sound boards, and most of all, instruments. The house is an unparalleled feat of production design by Marco Bittner Rosser. It's no wonder that the movie spends most of its time here, despite having a perfectly gorgeous second location in Tangier, Morocco.
The ghoul who occupies this space is, surprise surprise, brooding. Tim Hiddleston broods with the best of them, though his performance is too on the nose. It exists on the surface; if he's depressed, he buys a wooden bullet, if he's annoyed, he makes a sardonic quip. Tilda Swinton is much more successful than her scene partner, though their chilly chemistry together is so good you often wouldn't notice. The script calls for Eve to be the optimist of the pair, but Swinton manages to find an angle of depth in which her optimistic cheer, honestly felt and expressed, is simultaneously plastering over a gaping existential dread. This is what comes from giving one of our greatest living actors plenty of space to play.
The supporting cast is no slouch either, with Anton Yelchin, John Hurt, Slimane Dazi and Jeffrey Wright all excellent in small roles as fixers and resources for the main two. Only Mia Wasikowska, playing Ava the vampire sister, falls short as the shallowest of the bunch. Her character shows up halfway through the film to artificially jump start the plot, which feels hardly necessary at that point. The characters speak of her ominously, but the reveal is that she's more of a singleminded party girl. I can't help but remember a much better gag in What We Do in the Shadows.* Her character isn't good for much beyond that first revelation. Like Eve's optimism, you could read Ava's irresponsibility as a result of centuries of repression, but Wasikowska doesn't have Swinton's multilayered performance skill.
*The Beast!
Only Lovers Left Alive exists as a vessel for eclectic production design, strong performances, and a captivating soundtrack put together by Jozef van Wissem, in collaboration with artists Yasmine Hamdan and SQÜRL. The film exceeds the script, and the direction is savvy enough to take the side of the melancholy design over the erudite screenplay. Rather than building toward anything, the film remains true to its depressive atmosphere by slowly petering out for the final half hour. Director Jim Jarmusch clearly wanted to make an anti-vampire movie, one dominated by cultured passivity rather than thrilling hunger. That makes the final shot a powerful inversion to the soft thoughtfulness of the rest of the film; no matter how disaffected and superior you become, at the end of the day we all get hungry.
3 / 5 BLOBS
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