Review of Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) by Clarisesamuels — 08 Nov 2014

This film is a close-up of a worldly vampire couple (Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston) who have been around for about five hundred years, give or take a century. The plot is minimalist and what little plot there is plays itself out very slowly, as this is a movie whose dialogue and cinematographic details have to be savored like a fine wine, or at the very least, like the best blood available to middle-aged vampires—which is Type O negative, to be smuggled out of hospital blood banks and paid for with wads of cash. Biting humans is a bit boorish in the twenty-first century, even if one disregards the problem of too many humans harboring microbes and viruses that can make a vampire ill. The two vampires, appropriately named Adam and Eve, are married but spend a lot of time apart to pursue their particular interests and pastimes. The film opens with Eve living in Tangiers where she is at home in a messy apartment cluttered with books from every literary period and in every conceivable language. She speaks all those languages fluently, including Arabic and Japanese, and she can speed-read a book by moving her hand lightly and swiftly over the page.

Adam, however, is of a different intellectual bent. He is a musician living in Detroit who writes hauntingly evocative rock & roll compositions, having evolved away from the classical music that he wrote hundreds of years ago. He claims he gave Schubert the adagio to a symphony without ever expecting acknowledgment, for after all, as their friend Kit (John Hurt) notes, getting the work out there is the most important thing. At this stage in Adam's life, fame no longer interests him anyway, and it would attract too much attention, so he labors alone in a run-down house that is as messy as Eve's, and he is nostalgic for the hard rock of the sixties and early seventies. With the help of a human acquaintance (Anton Yelchin), who gets paid handsomely for his services, Adam collects vintage guitars from the acid rock era. He rarely leaves his house except for the odd trip to the hospital to pick up a fresh supply of blood from the bribed doctor who helps him (Jeffrey Wright). Adam always wear tight black pants, T-shirts and a leather jacket, and has dark hair hanging in his eyes. Eve sports a thick head of long white hair that makes her blonder than blond, a beautiful albino. They can only go out at night and even under tungsten lighting, they wear stylish sunglasses. They are slender, elegant, and attractive—looking like a very hip couple who somehow survived the drug-addicted sixties with their personal style and their political philosophy intact. Together, after Eve leaves Tangier to join Adam in Detroit, they exude power and a high-voltage kind of energy.

Things get complicated when Eve's little sister (Mia Wasikowska), an impulsive and reckless vampire, shows up for a visit. Because of her intrusion, Adam and Eve are forced to abandon the safety of Adam's reclusive life in Detroit. They flee back to Tangier, where they find their precious blood is in short supply, forcing them for the first time since the fifteenth century to consider more radical forms of procurement. This low-level plot, however, is not the point of the film. Adam and Eve are observers of human behavior and are far superior to the average human in intelligence and wisdom, as well as bereft of all ego because having lived for 500 years means that their greatest achievements are behind them, and they have nothing left to prove. Instead, they are scholars of art history, music, literature, and architecture. With hands so sensitive that they have to remain encased in gloves, Eve can tell the age of an object merely by touching it. Their running commentary, always caustic and ironic, shows shrewd insight into the complicated nature of human nature. They are fine connoisseurs of antiques and historic buildings, taking great pleasure in admiring the craftsmanship of the good, old days. They live for the pleasure of the moment, the satisfaction of drinking only the best blood, the odd creative project for which they cannot take credit, and the romance of their eternal relationship with each other.

Tilda Swinton is a terrifically blasé vampire who understands intuitively that after 500 years, it's the little things that make life meaningful. Tom Hiddleston is equally brilliant at being droll, although not nearly as cheerful as his wife, and positively depressed, if not suicidal, about the vampiric condition. Their vampiric state is not quite evil or damned, but more like the resignation of aging hippies whose heyday is over and has left them mostly with a lot of memories, anecdotes, and artifacts. Their damnation is more about their jaded pessimism, and their intrinsic understanding that humans have somehow lost their way and cannot evolve or mature, which the couple see so clearly without being able to do anything about it. That, more than anything else, is truly the vision of the damned.