The first thing you might notice about the vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive is how effortlessly cosmopolitan they are. Smart, artsy, sexy — these undead are unequivocally cool.
That’s no surprise when you consider this is the work of writer-director Jim Jarmusch, a purveyor of the idiosyncratic (Dead Man, Night on Earth, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai). Jarmusch doesn’t make movies like anyone else, and Only Lovers Left Alive is hardly your run-of-the-mill vampire picture. It pulsates with an oddball sensibility, a nearly plotless affair that doesn’t include even a single instance of on-screen bloodsucking. (These creatures are far too civilized for such mischief.) But it still leaves a helluva bite mark.
Tom Hiddleston is Adam, a centuries-old musician currently squirreled away in an old Victorian house in Detroit. A brooding recluse surrounded by vinyl records and vintage guitars, his primary connections to the outside world are an adoring fan named Ian (Anton Yelchin) and a skittish doctor who keeps him stocked with O negative blood. It’s a lonely existence for a guy who used to hang out with Romantic poets, so Adam perks up some when he is visited by his wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), who has been residing in Morocco.
Eve is as warm and pleasant as Adam is dark and despairing. In other words, they make a magnificent couple. But they share some things in common, too, particularly a passion for literature, music, science and the like. Their closest friend is playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), a fellow vampire who, it turns out, really did pen Shakespeare’s masterpieces (or so Jarmusch would have you believe). It can’t be easy to remain interested in the world after several hundred years, but Adam and Eve maintain a deep appreciation for the artistic and the beautiful. Their aesthetic is reflected in a film packed with cultural references.
The undead embracing life in a decaying city can be in danger of irony overload. Adam refers to the living as “zombies,” lamenting everything from environmental destruction to humankind’s penchant for unsightly electrical wiring. Perhaps such observations are not exactly subtle, but Jarmusch and his cast make it work. The bulk of Only Lovers Left Alive teems with provocative ideas and memorable images.
Jarmusch has ideal collaborators in Hiddleston and Swinton, both of whom are terrific here. The movie shimmers and luxuriates along with its full-blooded characters who are, by turns, funny and profound. Drink it in.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 