Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) - Review

Only Lovers Left Alive - Sony Pictures Classics

Jim Jarmusch has returned to cinemas with a vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive, which apparently has surprised some. As if it is new for Jarmusch to approach what some might consider to be genre filmmaking with an intent to put his personal spin on it (Dead Man, Ghost Dog). I hardly think of Jarmusch as a steadfast realist. A vampire movie by Jim Jarmusch seems pretty unsurprising to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

The plot of Lovers involves a depressed, über-goth vampire named Adam (Tom Hiddleston) living in isolation in Detroit as he makes his music. He shuns the spotlight and repeatedly is aghast at the thought of anything cool - which apparently includes himself - going mainstream. When his wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), senses that Adam is suicidal, she leaves her home in Tangiers (where she spookily haunts the streets at night on her way to meet Christopher Marlowe - yes, that Christopher Marlowe - to buy some blood) to visit Detroit. There Adam and Eve revel in each other's companies and bash "zombies" (non-vampires or anyone not as cool as them) until Eve's precocious, reckless sister Ava shows up - from, gasp, LA - and causes some trouble. You see, in this day and age vampires are too civilized to go out killing people - but Ava hasn't exactly read that memo.

Jarmusch, who wrote and directed, paints a portrait of dissatisfaction with the cultural climate and a sense of depression about cretinous zombies - i.e., people less cool than him - simultaneously destroying the world with anti-science lunacy and populating the world with bland culture.

The fundamental question that remains unresolved for me is whether Jarmusch is actually serious or whether he's parodying himself. The fact that it could be either might be a sign of its genius.

While this movie could have just as easily been titled The Coolest People Left Alive, the self-seriousness of Adam is pretty amazing. Hiddleston plays it to the hilt but seems to be serious about it. Swinton on the other hand, plays things up but seems to be having more fun about it. Then again, that could just be that Swinton's character seems to roll her eyes at Adam as much as the audience might.

If Jarmusch is trying to make a serious point about cultural deficiencies and decay, I'm not sure he hits the mark. He laments for a theater in Detroit that has been left to decay and has become a car park, and it is saddening. On the other hand, it isn't like there are no other theaters (maybe instead of thinking LA has cooties, he could come see the progress LA has made in restoring some of its grand old theaters). Losing the past is a shame and shouldn't happen, but losing sight of the present in a fog of past glories isn't any more helpful.

Jarmusch's nostalgia can be too much at times because he seems to only begrudgingly admit that there may be some good things out there (if we position Adam as a stand-in for Jarmusch, then Jarmusch certainly thinks highly of his own recent works).

Jarmusch's perspective also isn't entirely consistent. Adam and Eve seem openly disdainful of the culture around them and yet simultaneously worshipful of human culture (Adam has a wall of photos of his cultural heroes on it; Eve speed-reads classic literature with unconcealed joy). Jarmusch makes his distaste for the American South and Los Angeles quite well known but seemingly half the songs on the soundtrack come from southern musicians. Ava comes from LA, which Adam particularly despises, and she seems to reflect Jarmusch's statement on what he perceives to be the youth-oriented recklessness and soul-sucking nature of LA and LA-based art. Of course Buster Keaton's movies were Hollywood entertainments, which Adam seems to enjoy. Jarmusch disdains mass appeal culture, but such disdain seems to only apply to modern culture, not anything prior to 1970 that happened to appeal to the masses (Adam listens to rockabilly and seems to have been heavily influenced by Lord Byron, who was hardly a marginal figure in his lifetime). Unless it involves Jack White, of course.

At times you want to scream at Adam to stop posing so hard and go out and find the culture that's out there to be loved, but I suspect that Jarmusch might have been saying the same thing. The film seems to reflect both Jarmusch's vitriol toward a culture he doesn't seem to respect with perhaps a begrudging acknowledgement that maybe he just needs to get out more. Indeed, Eve tries to make Adam do just that, and when Adam finally leaves the house he seems to keep running into musical acts he respects.

The inconsistencies and the annoyingly self-serious cultural criticism might not have worked so well if there wasn't that warped undercurrent of parody. I mean, one of the heroes on Adam's picture wall is Rodney Dangerfield. I recently slammed Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America for being too self-indulgent in its cultural criticism. Here, Jarmusch seems to know better how to cut his disdain for society a bit more down to size (the film is also infinitely more gorgeous to look at).

At any rate, even if you don't see this as self-parody on Jarmusch's part, it is still pretty damn well made, it looks great, and it features high-charisma performances, especially from Swinton. Even though there are some moments that provoke an eye-roll at the self-serious posing, I took it ultimately as just good fun. At the end of the day, while they may need to be deflated a bit, Adam and Jarmusch are, in fact, pretty cool after all.

Screened in the theater at the Noho 7.