Bloody Sheets, Bad Sweaters, and Broken Hearts: The Wisdom Of Crocodiles

By Jemiah Jefferson

Jude Law, tasty son-of-a-bitch.

Originally this was going to be a gushing review of a very beautiful, very sexy vampire film that I remember loving the hell out of, but hadn’t seen in a very long time—ten years or so. Within 30 minutes of rewatching, though, this became much more of an exercise in “the golden glow of memory masking the flaws of fact.” Filmmaking, vampire movies, and I were all in somewhat different eras in 1999; we’ve all come a long way, and The Wisdom Of Crocodiles hasn’t really kept up. Unjustly obscure, the film also suffers from having been titled Immortality for its US release, and the shitty production values used when slapping its American title on the screen makes it look like it’s just a very expensive episode of the new Outer Limits.

Am I the only person in the world who gives Jude Law a lifetime free pass for having been, at one time, the hottest piece of ass in movies? Crocodiles really displays him at the height of his game, that is, if you like the pale-countenanced, doe-eyed insincerity of broody Jude, as I and so many others have done. Don’t be ashamed; a lot of us were heavily into Jude in the halcyon days of the 90s, back when the world was innocent and new. In fact, I’m still a big Jude fan, and it doesn’t bother me that he’s gone a ways toward wrecking his looks with booze, drugs, fatherhood, and too many of entirely the wrong women.

Here, he plays the oddly named Steven Grlscz, a broody, sensitive vampire who often lapses into hours of staring into space in the dark. We take it that this is all part and parcel of the vampire’s lifestyle, or at least, Grlscz’s, who comes across as an empty vessel whose personality is entirely dependent on the woman he is currently in love with. Even more than he needs blood, though, Steve Grlscz needs love. From each victim, he distills the dominant emotion at the time of death, and maintains a selection of creepy scrapbooks wherein he catalogues their emotional relationships. (Hey, I never said this movie espoused a healthy romantic attitude.)

Steve lives in the requisite totally sweet crib: a couple of thousand square feet, skylights, secret rooms, luxurious European furniture in the appropriately brooding blood-drenched earth tones, etc. He also has been known to sport a long black coat from time to time, but it’s not an essential; most of the time he wears one of a selection of alarmingly dorky chunky sweaters.

“My sweater shows the depths of my immortal despair.”

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