dvd of the week
In Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, an incandescent Tilda Swinton plays Eve, an achingly-sweet, centuries-old aesthete who happens to be a vampire. Her similarly afflicted husband Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston (who is Loki in the Thor films and The Avengers), is a glum musical genius who hides from the world, composing from afar, talking to no one but a clueless hired hand (Anton Yelchin) and his wife, but to her only over Skype. She lives in Tangiers, along with her friend Kit Marlowe (yes, that one, played by John Hurt), and Adam lives in a particularly dilapidated section of Detroit. She decides to come to him after he expresses more suicidally depressive thoughts about the weight of the world. During her visit, as they discuss history and art and their love, Eve’s crass and silly sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) arrives, and she creates situations that force this short story in the lives of Adam and Eve to climax in hunger and, of course, blood. Hiddleston is wonderful in the movie, bitterly funny and in awe of his wife, but Swinton is the loving, beating, glorious heart of the film (despite her heart probably not beating at all). Jarmusch has made a movie about the undead that is actually about living.
