“Only Lovers Left Alive” is set in the modern day, but everything seems a little darker than the world we inhabit. The protagonists are vampires, but not the usual kind -- they get their food from hospital blood banks and spend most of their time brooding about, making indie rock music. At least, Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) do. Yes, they’re actually named Adam and Eve. Also in this world is Eve’s younger sister (Mia Wasikowska), a less jaded and more mischievous brand of vampire. Together, they mostly brood, argue and rotate family dramas.
The movie feels a bit like a strange caricature of a Smiths song. Eve loves soaking up old architecture and art. Adam loves tinkering with technology. He also has pictures of scientists hanging all over his wall -- Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla -- you name it. Our leading man, it comes to light, was the mentor and confidant of these brilliant thinkers. Eve’s best friend is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the famous and fabled contemporary of Shakespeare, who also happens to be a vampire.
Vampires seem an odd choice for legendary indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, of 1989’s “Mystery Train” and 2005’s “Broken Flowers.” However, his versatility across genres -- he has dealt with everything from crime movies like “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai” (1999) to brooding music dramas like 2009’s “The Limits of Control” -- suggests he could bring an interesting vision to the vampire film. Instead, the vampires here become very loosely defined metaphors, functioning mostly as tools for Jarmusch to exercise his cynicism about modernity.
Where “Only Lovers Left Alive” overflows with largely western, Enlightenment era cultural references, it lacks in story. Entire scenes are defined by nothing but false sentimentality for a false past. Jarmusch constructs this film in a way that is relatable -- there is wistfulness for a bygone era -- and awe-inducing. Rarely does a film ask the audience to love Shakespeare and believe humans were too petty to have created such work, before you can connect to its protagonists.
Though it seems the stars were cast solely for their prominent cheekbones, they are still incredibly talented. It’s a pity, then, to see their abilities wasted on such empty material. Swinton and Hiddleston get plenty of time to do the kind of elegant physical acting that few films offer. Their settings are aesthetically elegant -- rundown Detroit becomes the ruins of a once-great empire, Tangier becomes a nostalgic nighttime urban mecca and airplanes become great ships of the explorer era. But for all this beauty, these backdrops still feel like sets for elaborate music videos rather than locations that facilitate discourse on the state of art in modernity.
There are brief moments when Wasikowska explodes in her role, injecting sarcastic life into the seedy world of Detroit. She takes her character’s dull lines and turns them into delicious rhythms, toying with the naivetACCENTe of wannabe indie musicians and the pretensions of her sister and brother-in-law. Even so, the story feels empty; we never have reason to care about the family drama between her and our protagonists. Once she’s out of the picture, however, the rest of the film is clearly revealed for what it has been all along -- an elaborate backdrop, a painting that seems to be waiting for an interesting subject into its foreground.
Ultimately, “Only Lovers Left Alive” isn’t actually about vampires. It’s about art, timeless love and irony. Jarmusch takes great pains to remind us over and over again that these vampires are really a kind of artistic elite, who can see beyond single human lifetimes and truly appreciate the scientific and artistic beauty of the world.
If only the film were about vampires -- at least then we wouldn’t be subjected to an aimless and dripping lament. Adam can’t even make music with peace and quiet because petty human hipsters insist on making him famous. Though Eve reminds Adam that he has a tendency to get periodically annoyed with humans every other century or so, there’s something different about his current frustrations. The past just seemed better and more beautiful.
A disappointment from the usually innovative Jarmusch, “Only Lovers Left Alive” is best seen as a visual treat. Perhaps some creative young artist will take these images and remix music videos out of them. That, at least, would have a rhythm and a purpose to it. For now, we are left with an incredibly pretentious and conservative paean to an era none of us have seen.
