The thrilling thing about life is that its rich pageant does’t go on forever. No honest person claims to know the meaning of it all. But everyone knows time on earth is finite which makes life all the more special. For the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive, that might very well be the problem. They are constantly, endlessly alive. They are immortal and existing indiscriminately through the years with no end in sight. It appears to be a real drag. Jim Jarmusch’s new movie (the veteran filmmaker wrote and directed) is not a soap opera saga like Twilight and it’s not a grisly tale of blood-sucking horror like Let the Right One In (or its superior American remake, Let Me In). This is a stranger creation altogether. It’s part love story, part comedy, part bland drama, part swampy stonerish-mood piece. Seldom have the undead been quite this dead.
These are vampires who have done and seen everything there is to see. And they’re pretty bored by it. Tom Hiddleston-best known to most moviegoers as Loki from Thor and The Avengers-is Adam, a longhaired rocker recluse holed away in Detroit (the metaphor of setting this in a dying, receding and very lonely city is apt). He spends his time composing great music that nobody is supposed to hear, least of all the human race (or as he humorously calls them “zombies”). A hired hand (an eager, likeable Anton Yelchin) takes care of nearly everything for him from fetching classic guitars and antiquated recording equipment to very odd requests like hunting down a wooden bullet. Adam in the past composed famous masterpieces anonymously and now just seems as though he can’t be bothered with anything.
His wife, Eve (played by Tilda Swinton), lives half way across the world in Tangier. What’s intriguing about Only Lovers Left Alive is the way that Jarmusch clearly doesn’t mean that to be taken as a disconnect between them. If anything, it speaks to an even deeper, through the centuries bond. When they are reunited again, the passion flares. The distance is everything and nothing to them all at once.
This is probably about as realistic and plausible a depiction of vampires as you could conjure up. Both Adam and Eve live in close proximity to blood suppliers. The days of killing people for their vein juice are gone and its place is a safer, more 21st century way of getting it done like ordering it so you get the right type (O negative, naturally). Adam visits a nearby hospital looking like death itself in murderous sunglasses and his face hidden behind a medical mask, arriving unannounced on a doctor willing to siphon off from the supplies for a pretty penny (one of the finest supporting actors, Jeffrey Wright). It’s never stated whether this doc knows what it’s used for, but he’s so spooked by Adam you can’t help but suspect he senses something very weird is going on. Eve’s supplier is a man old even by the standards of ageless mortality, Christopher Marlowe (Shakespeare’s contemporary) played by John Hurt. When they get their hands on precious blood, it’s like a drug—and so is the movie in those moments. They drink it, they make popsicles out of it, and they are literally rejuvenated for a fleeting spell.
Jarmusch throughout expresses a genuine fondness for a world being renovated and taped over (a scene where Adam and Eve explore one of the many empty historical spots in Detroit together, including driving by real-life vampire Jack White’s home, is lovely). The mood is both nostalgic and somewhat lamenting. The cast is fully extraordinary. Hiddleston and Swinton make a splendid, somber pair. On his own, Hiddleston makes his moodiness bordering on suicidal and his cold, knee-jerk unpleasantness rather hypnotic. Hurt is marvelous. Yelchin makes you wish he got more-and meatier-roles.
Jarmusch gets the set-up for all this to a place where if it’s not perfect, than it’s at least entrancingly mysterious. For the fifteen minutes or so I thought I was watching one of the year’s great films. Then by the time Adam and Eve have made love (the movie’s color scheme renders the sight of their pale naked bodies literally shocking) and Eve’s sister who’s not technically related (Mia Wasikowska) shows up for the first time in nearly a hundred years to cause heaps of predictable trouble, it does a quick job of falling apart. Almost nothing happens. That’s okay. Some of the best films have even less transpiring in terms of plot, but they don’t feel that way. Only Lovers Left Alive definitely does. In stretches it’s such meandering tedium that the scenes play like chopped up moments randomly spliced together for a theatrical trailer. Jarmusch gets the banal, perversely ordinary aspects of their glum lives and customs down so well that it’s just humdrum. There’s too much intelligence and too many ideas swirling to not feel stung by that. Only Lovers Left Alive is visually stunning and unnervingly creepy at times, but ultimately quite dull. The movie has fangs, but it only flashes them.
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