Only Lovers Left Alive

Only Lovers Left Alive may be a hard sell for some. It is slow-moving, and its two main characters—a pair of centuries-old vampires named Adam and Eve—are a trifle pretentious. (They sit around reminiscing about days past, when they rubbed arms with Shakespeare and hung out with Byron.) Perhaps it would help any uninitiated viewers to go back and watch a couple movies by the director, Jim Jarmusch, as a primer for this one. I despised his somber 1995 Western Dead Man, but I think it prepared me to respond to this film, which isn’t particularly “exciting” as vampire movies go, and yet it’s a truly beautiful movie, one in which the characters are given the time and space to truly inhabit the screen.

Tom Hiddleston plays Adam, the moody, depressed musician who pisses the night away recording music in his creaky Victorian house in Detroit. That music isn’t supposed to reach an audience, and yet Adam has a coterie of hipster music enthusiasts loitering outside his house from time to time. He has a young friend—a musician-type named Ian (played by Anton Yelchin) who runs errands for him (like tracking down rare and expensive guitars), and who tries to coax some music out of Adam from time to time.

As Adam’s wife Eve, Tilda Swinton exudes a pretty groovy fashion sense; she has beautiful white hair that makes her seem ageless; she’s a book lover; and she lives all the way in Tangier, like the tragic author Jane Bowles did during the last 20 years of her life. But Eve seems a lot more even-keeled than the sad-faced Adam, perhaps because she’s just not the brooding, loner type. She passes most of her time either reading or visiting with her old kindred spirit, the poet Christopher Marlowe (played by John Hurt), who, it turns out, is also a vampire. What’s more, he wrote all those plays for which Shakespeare got the credit.

When Eve packs her bags to leave Tangier and visit Adam, she doesn’t take clothes. She takes books. And as she decides which books, she devours several of them then and there. (It takes her mere seconds to read a page.) They’re dusty volumes of thick yellow husks of paper in various languages, the kind of books that belong in your dream library. (And maybe in the dream someone else can dust them and keep them from deteriorating.) It makes you realize just how wonderful it would be to live hundreds of years if only for the sheer number of books you could read. However, as I pondered the strange and wonderful freedoms these two characters had, I thought: Could vampires travel into deep space? Would they want to? Seeing as such endeavors can take decades or even longer, it stands to reason that immortal beings would be ideal candidates. But then, what if they were gone for 150 years or longer, and came back to a society that had become utterly foreign to them? Perhaps it wouldn’t feel worth it to take such a long break from things, even if they spend their days as outsiders. 

Adam and Eve have of course existed over multiple centuries, but they’ve been present in all of them, not away on some interstellar mission. They’ve been—however marginally—a part of history and culture. We see this in the measured, frustrated contempt they have for the “zombies” (humans) over how much we’ve ruined our own planet and our resources. Their longevity enables them to put the momentary world crises into a pretty awesome perspective. But again, there are moments when these kinds of observations (“Remember the English Civil War?”) feel more than a bit pretentious.

           

Viewers may wonder about the blood. Yes, these vampires do subsist on blood, only they don’t go prowling the streets for fresh victims. They aren’t killers (generally), and prefer to get pure blood from trustworthy sources like blood banks. There are a lot of amusing jokes about the fears of getting contaminated blood, and the dreadful sicknesses that can befall a vampire if this happens. So they have reliable suppliers of clean blood, and this is made all the easier by the fact that both of them seem to have an endless supply of ready cash.

While there are no vampire movies like Only Lovers Left Alive (one of the reasons it’s such an interesting film), there are two that we might call its distant cousins: Bill Gunn’s strange, lost vampire-art film Ganja and Hess (1973) and George A. Romero’s celebrated yet also overlooked Martin (1978). Gunn’s film, which was barely seen upon release and then wasted away in obscurity for years, looks at vampirism through the lens of addiction in the black community. Martin asks the question "Is any of this supernatural stuff actually real, or is it just in the vampire's mind, and the minds of those that oppose him?"

Martin is particularly akin to Jarmusch’s film in that it’s set in a dying factory town (Pittsburgh). There’s something fascinating about this. Why would vampires be attracted to these symbolically rotting cities? Perhaps they can go unnoticed more easily. It certainly aids Adam and Eve when they are forced to dispose of one of Ava’s victims’ bodies. In the dead of night, they drive to an abandoned, unfinished building and dump the body into a pool of acid. They aren’t proud of it, but they’re also not particularly sad either. More likely it's Detroit's music roots that have attracted the loner rock star Adam. 

Only Lovers Left Alive is a lovely night owl of a movie, and the crowning achievement of a director whose films have always been praised/cursed with that word “idiosyncratic.” But what if more directors were able to take something as tried and true as the vampire legend and fashion it into an original work of strange, melancholy genius like this one? It’s rare to find a film that lets you simply enter inside it and walk around. But you have to be open to this kind of viewing to really enjoy it. Otherwise, it will probably tax your patience.

With Mia Wasikowska as Eve's fun-loving vampire sister, who lives in L.A. (and riles the curmudgeonly Adam when she comes unexpectedly for a visit). 

Dead Man

A dull Western about a man named William Blake (Johnny Depp) who takes it on the lam after he kills a another man, sort of in self-defense. Then he meets an Indian named Nobody who spouts off philosophical sounding ramblings that make no sense. Writer-director Jim Jarmusch confuses pretension for art with this antithetical Western. It's in black-and-white, a crucial mistake. Perhaps some color would have made the movie feel less embalmed, but I'm afraid that was Jarmusch's intent all along: he's trying to make something poetic, and all he really does is make a film that reminds us why we hate bad poetry, or why we don't give poetry a chance when it's delivered to us without imagination.

The camera stays in close-up for much of the film, so we don't even get the usually standard pleasure of the vastness of space that many Westerns capture. This, combined with the grim ugliness of the black-and-white photography, makes much of Dead Man pretty dead indeed. Johnny Depp is okay, especially since he's playing a relatively normal character, but he's such a subdued personality when he's not hamming it up, that he's hardly magnetic enough to pull this long, meandering movie out of its self-induced sleepwalk. If people were mesmerized by all the poetry of the black-and-white and the false wisdom of the mystical "Nobody," it's because they were probably ready to embrace something that was different, and there weren't many good traditional Westerns coming out of the 1990s. But turning this genre into something bland and plodding is no way to save it from the tiredness of doing the same thing over and over.

There are interesting moments, and at times Jarmusch finds the humor in it. Some of the bandits trying to capture William Blake--who's got a 500 dollar bounty placed on him by the father of the man he killed--are funny in a ruthlessly sick sort of way, like the man who allegedly murdered his parents, and then engaged in necrophilia and cannibalism with their bodies. And the character of Nobody doesn't seem to totally buy into the BS he's peddling to William. Is he an ironic Indian? (He's also convinced that William is the William Blake, as in the 18th century British Romanticist poet.) But, like Dances With Wolves, the film tries to imbibe the Native Americans with wisdom and mystical powers, all dispensed in the form of hokey sounding proverbs, and you never buy any of it: it's too patronizing, and too laughable. It's the never-ending search for self-importance that dooms so many "indie" films. (There's also a running joke about tobacco that isn't funny--it's done to death and never had any juice to begin with.)

With Gary Farmer as Nobody, John Hurt, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Eugene Byrd, Iggy Pop, Gabriel Byrne, Jared Harris, Mili Avital, Crispin Glover, Robert Mitchum in a small role as the man who's funding Blake's capture. Neil Young provides the one-note music score via his electric guitar. It's simply anachronistic, and one more part of Dead Man that enervates the entire movie. 1995.

Ghost Dog

Forest Whitaker plays a hitman who's known affectionately and yet with a certain amount of trepidation as Ghost Dog. He has a "gift" for effecting successful and stealth contract killings. However, when his latest job doesn't turn out exactly the way his clients wanted, Ghost Dog becomes a target of a bunch of aging mafiosos. They're relics of the golden age of mobster movies, men who were probably pretty tough in 1972, but who are now slow and fat and wrinkled and have raspy voices and dulled reflexes. Ghost Dog lithely eludes their labored attempts to confront and kill him.

Whitaker turns his character into some kind of a deadly teddy bear. He's into samarai literature and philosophy, and reading in general, and his best friend (played by Isaach de Bankole) is a Haitian immigrant who only speaks French and drives an ice cream truck. When Ghost Dog--whose real name is withheld from us--meets a bright young girl named Pearline in the park, the two strike up an unlikely friendship that, while brief, proves to illuminate a great deal to us about Ghost Dog's character. He and she seem to exist in completely other worlds from their Jersey City surroundings.

Ghost Dog is devoted to the code of the Samarai, and everyone around him is oblivious to the idea of living by any code whatsoever, except for the mafiosos, who are on borrowed time in their chosen profession. You start to laugh at the ridiculousness of overaged men still trying to be badasses. It's meant to be comical, and when the light bulb suddenly clicks (there are no younger dudes with guns in this group--it's the world's first geriatric mafia), you realize that this movie is going to be fun. It's deliberately slow-paced, but the camera work by Robby Muller is arresting: the atmosphere of Ghost Dog leaves one feeling on edge, but there's a fluid lull to the imagery that keeps you glued to the screen. There's something almost unspeakable about the feel of this movie. It's akin to the film's wryly funny and yet touchingly reverent view of its main character, who's some kind of criminal religious figure with almost mystical sensibilities.

The action is exciting, in part because the director, Jim Jarmusch, doesn't overload the movie with shootouts. And he's very subtle about them. Those scenes creep up on you when you don't expect them, and while there are touches of brutality, nothing is handled humorlessly: you're always conscious of the fact that this movie doesn't take itself too seriously. It's a mystical, breezy crime thriller: something of an anomaly, perhaps, but quite a good piece of entertainment, sustained by Whitaker's fine performance.

With John Tormey, Cliff Gorman, Tricia Vessey, Henry Silva, Victor Argo, Vinny Vella, Joseph Rigano, and Camille Winbush. Music by RZA. 1999.