Review: Only Lovers Left Alive
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Even bloodsuckers get the blues in Jim Jarmusch's tragicomic exploration of mortality, which apparently sucks even when you can't die.
SIPPING ON VEIN SANGRIA: Tilda Swinton stars as one of the glamorously undead in Jim Jarmusch’s vampire flick.
City Paper grade: A
Even bloodsuckers get the blues in Jim Jarmusch’s tragicomic exploration of mortality, which apparently sucks even when you can’t die. Intricate in mood but straightforward in exposition, it doesn’t tear down and recobble neck-biting cinematic stereotypes so much as manipulate them with a mind toward the humanities.
Setting up shop somewhere between Jandek, Kurt Cobain and Trent Reznor on the tortured-genius spectrum, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a jaded loner musician who happens to subsist on an all-red, all-liquid diet. Residing alone in a dilapidated mansion in ghostly Detroit, his only contact with the human world comes via Ian (Anton Yelchin), an eager-to-please errand boy obsessed with Adam's tunes; and Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright), who’s happy to pocket cash in exchange for his lab’s canisters of fresh vein sangria. Though he stays busy anonymously recording and releasing music, Adam grows disillusioned by the shortsighted mortals he refers to as “zombies” — so much so that his also-very-undead wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), decides to fly in from Tangiers to cheer him up.
"I just feel like all the sand is at the bottom of the hourglass or something," Adam laments of his lot in eternal life, a line that'd come off as pretentious and whiny if Jarmusch wasn't so skilled at contextualizing the ennui with the quiet quirks of a long-term relationship. The film is dark, figuratively and, of course, literally, but Adam and Eve’s time together — listening to records, strolling through the Motor City’s spooky urban ruins — is light and tender. If you’ve ever connected with a love interest over a favorite artist, novel, movie or album, you’ll be able to relate, even if your canines aren’t filed to an unsettling point.
Though the couple is superior in every category, both are curators of human accomplishment, speaking of friendships with Pythagoras, Galileo and Poe in the same way we fondly remember pals from primary school. They carry the brunt of the load, but Jarmusch's secondary characters still possess utility and personality — a wispy John Hurt, as the patriarchal Marlowe, and Mia Wasikowska, as Eve's plucky, deviant little sister, bookend Adam and Eve's earthly experience.
