Movie Review : ‘Vampire’: Undead on Arrival : Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt try to infuse the characters of Anne Rice’s bestseller with the age-within-beauty quality.

“Interview With the Vampire” is half alive, which for a movie about the undead is not as bad as it sounds.

Directed by “The Crying Game’s” Neil Jordan from the brooding, sweepingly popular book about how “the dark gift” of eternal life is passed on from the vampire Lestat to a handsome young aristocrat named Louis, “Interview” has been the subject of considerable speculation because of the divergent public positions author Anne Rice has taken about the film version.

Rice broke with protocol more than a year ago to lambaste the selection of Tom Cruise as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis, scathingly comparing it to “casting Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer” and reserving special scorn for Cruise, “who is no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.”

Then, about a month ago, Rice appeared to reverse herself, saying the finished product “surpassed my maddest expectations” and stunned her with how faithful it was “to the spirit, the content and the ambience of the novel.” Now that the film is here, these seemingly contradictory positions turn out to be both correct.

For director Jordan, whose elegantly gory 1984 version of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” can be seen as a dress rehearsal for “Interview,” has a feel for the supernatural and a gift for establishing creepy mood and atmosphere that this film fully exploits.

Whatever else it lacks, “Interview” does a gorgeous job of re-creating not only 18th-Century New Orleans and 19th-Century Paris but also the book’s genuinely weird, disturbing, almost unimaginable world of those who can never die.

Put together by a superior team, including Oscar-winning “A River Runs Through It” cinematographer Philippe Rousselot (who lit the film with Chinese paper lanterns), “The Age of Innocence” production designer Dante Ferretti and “Orlando” costume designer Sandy Powell, “Interview’s” visual strength does all that can be done to convincingly set the stage for drama. That element, however, almost never arrives because “Interview With the Vampire” is fatally anemic in terms of emotional weight and attachment.

Although the book was originally written out of Rice’s agony at having lost a young daughter and consequently has a powerful air of despairing melancholy about it, the movie version (with a script credited to Rice alone, although Jordan is known to have contributed) has little sense of love or loss for an audience to connect with.

The reason is the casting, where the filmmakers made a pact with the devil and have paid the price. After Daniel Day-Lewis, who would have made a memorable Lestat, turned the role down, it went to Tom Cruise, he of the $2-billion and counting worldwide gross, while Louis’ part went to the equally photogenic Pitt.

And why not? Jordan and company insisted as the outrage mounted. The vampires were young and handsome and the actors playing them should be likewise. The dramatic reality, however, is subtler than that. What makes Lestat and Louis such involving characters is that they have ancient minds and souls in their lithe bodies, and neither Pitt nor Cruise has the persona or the acting range to convey that critical age-within-beauty quality.

Pitt has an easier time of it with Louis, the young Louisiana plantation owner turned vampire with a conscience who despairs at having to take human life to live. As he tells his story in today’s San Francisco to a young journalist (Christian Slater, who replaced River Phoenix), Louis remembers back to Louisiana in 1791, when he was a 24-year-old widower who longed to be gone himself because of his wife’s recent death.

Instead of expiring, Louis is turned into one of the brotherhood of darkness by the sinister Lestat, the cold and hateful vampire’s vampire who kills for revenge against life and whom the book describes as “masterfully clever and utterly vicious.”

Although he works his hardest at the part and doesn’t embarrass himself, even with the help of Stan Winston’s vampire makeup Tom Cruise is plainly miscast as Lestat. He is determined and has his moments, but it is simply too much of a stretch even from his Oscar-nominated role in “Born on the Fourth of July” to play a hateful 18th-Century French fop with the fey habit of bringing his handkerchief to his mouth. And with Lestat softened, the fury Louis and Claudia, the 5-year-old turned into a vampire by Lestat’s whim, come to feel toward him makes less emotional sense.

While the movie eliminates several of the book’s characters, it wouldn’t dare do without Claudia and Armand, a Parisian vampire met during the next century when Louis goes abroad on a kind of fact-finding mission. Both 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst and the magnetic Antonio Banderas bring the kind of delicately eroticized menace to their parts that Cruise and Pitt ought to be conveying but can’t manage, and “Interview” is better for it.

Although Hollywood will never lose its lust to turn bestsellers into film, “Interview” demonstrates why they can be tricky. Some things are better imagined than seen, and while it’s one thing to read “the blood flowed like water,” it is quite another to actually sit through as much bloodletting (much of it inflicted on women) as the film puts on screen.

Another place where actually seeing things changes the emphasis is in “Interview’s” homoerotic qualities. Although the men mad about men subtext is in Rice’s book (where Louis mourns his brother, not his wife), scenes like a frenzied Cruise passionately burying his head in Pitt’s neck give parts of this film as much male-male sexual energy as Hollywood has ever allowed.

But for every part of “Interview” that is effective, there are others that are not; witness the gimmicky ending and the campy humor that sporadically comes out of nowhere. Like the vampires themselves, the film occupies a kind of nether world, sporadically coming alive just when you think it has gone away for good. Perhaps that is appropriate, after all.

* MPAA rating: R, for vampire violence and gore, and for sexuality. Times guidelines: It includes considerable shedding of blood, a body chopped in half, other bodies consumed by fire and a general air of decadence. ‘Interview With the Vampire’

Tom Cruise: Lestat

Brad Pitt: Louis

Antonio Banderas: Armand

Stephen Rea: Santiago

Christian Slater: Malloy

Kirsten Dunst: Claudia

A Geffen Pictures presentation, released by Warner Bros. Director Neil Jordan. Producers Stephen Woolley, David Geffen. Screenplay Anne Rice, based on her novel. Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. Editor Mick Audsley. Costumes Sandy Powell. Music Elliot Goldenthal. Production design Dante Ferretti. Supervising art director Malcolm Middleton. Set decorator Francesa Lo Schiavo. Vampire makeup and effects Stan Winston. Running time: 2 hours.

* In general release throughout Southern California. More Reviews Online: * For L.A. Times reviews on all the major movies still playing in Southern California, check the new TimesLink online service. JUMP: (Movies).

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