Dunst Able

Further to my comments about the lovely Kirsten Dunst: I re-watched Interview with the Vampire the other night, for the first time since about 1995. The film is, for the most part, insufferably humourless, with Messrs Pitt and Cruise lounging around lounging around looking terribly decorative and fin-de-siècle, and a pretentious vampirism-as-AIDS metaphor which was done rather better in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula [*].

However, the young Ms Dunst's performance is absolute genius. She plays the vampire child Claudia, who is "turned" when young and who will therefore never grow older; and she does it with a passion and a tragedy which are simply astonishing. How an eleven-year-old girl (which appears to have been her age at the time, although she's made up to look a good deal younger) could so effectively convey the pain of a forty-year old imprisoned in a pre-pubertal body I can't imagine, but Dunst is utter dynamite in the role.

It's kind of unfortunate, really, that the Spider-Man films use such an impressive talent mostly as decoration... although to be fair the entire point of Mary Jane's character is her reassuring ordinariness, so there's not an awful lot for any actor to work with there.

Incidentally, both Dunst and Winona Ryder (who played the semi-vampirised Mina in Bram Stoker's aforementioned Dracula) appeared as two of the sisters in Little Women. Did any of the other sisters in that film play vampires? (Has Clare Danes, for instance?) Inquiring minds want to know.


[*] Speaking of taking Stoker's name in vain, I was amused by the legend identifying the author of this recent Buffy novel.