Only Lovers Left Alive

Film (2013)

With Tom Hiddleston (Adam), Tilda Swinton (Eve), Mia Wasikowska (Ava), John Hurt (Marlowe), Anton Yelchin (Ian), Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Watson), Yasmine (Yasmine Hamdan)

There is not much plot to this film. Adam (Tom Huddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), who live in different places – he in Detroit and she in Tangiers – get together. He scores blood by paying off a technician at a hospital. They are frequented by Ian (Anton Yelchin), a famous rock star who gets old guitars for Adam, by Ava (Mia Wasikowska), Eve’s sister, and by their old friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the Elizabethan playwright.

My greatest surprise came after seeing the film. Having been quite uninterested, unstimulated and unmoved while watching it, I discovered afterwards that quite a few of the others who attended the screening were very taken by its tone. I was simply bored, and, when not bored, struck by what I thought was not very good filmmaking. I walked out thinking that this must be a common feeling, only to find that it wasn’t at all. Others seemed to get into the deliberate slow disposition of this film, enjoying simmering in its dark expanses. Oh well – vive la différence.

Though I am not extremely well versed in Jim Jarmusch’s work, I did like Broken Flowers (2005) quite a bit, which portrayed, through Bill Murray’s distinctive ironies, an interesting anti-hero. Though it’s been awhile since I saw it, I do recall it had both a compelling mood and enough of a plot to drive it.

Despite a lack of plot, Only Lovers Left Alive has mood, though I was not really able to get into it at all. I was not particularly drawn to the relationship depicted between Adam and Eve and found it pretty much without magnetism or passion.

Despite that lack of passion, there was, however, one point in the film that piqued my interest. In Tangiers, Adam and Eve are watching a gorgeous singer named Yasmine (Yasmine Hamdan), and one does begin to wonder whether Adam’s attraction to her will cause him to ditch Eve. But no – there turns out to be something so profoundly enduring about the relationship between Adam and Eve, despite what seems the complete lack of chemistry between them, that it makes such ventures impossible. It is actually kind of endearing, a real family-values turn for the vampire set, reinforcing the idea that even blood-lusters can, over the millenia, have settled relationships based on affection rather than eroticism.

I am not sure what the cosmology of this movie is, but there is a lot of reference to zombies, as though they populated the earth instead of people. Perhaps those better versed in this sort of thing would make easy sense of it, but to me it was just an unexplained oddity.

Despite the occasional wisp of irony within the bleak and moody landscape, I found relatively little that was redeeming about this film. The writing struck me as limited and ineffective, the direction not at all compelling, the cinematography and editing sophomoric.

Tilda Swinton, whose work I sometimes appreciate, does nothing much for me here, nor does Tom Hiddleston. Mia Wasikowska, a great young actress whose work I have enjoyed immensely in several other films, is, to my mind, completely misused and, sadly, I felt nothing compelling about even her performance. John Hurt, who I always associate with his viscerally exhibitive portrayal in Alien (1979), offers a hairy and hip Christopher Marlowe, a kind of blood-sipping Falstaff, a welcome addition of comic relief.

– BADMan