Union Square Station
Malone
2/16

The Silence of the Critics

Anthony Hopkins reappeared in his role as Hannibal Lecter last weekend, confronting audiences with the kind of fabulous humor for which only the profoundly evil, such as the Marquis de Sade, have the reach. "Bowels in or out?" Lecter asks considerately, blade in hand, of a victim he's about to hang. 

Whereas Jody Foster excused herself from a return as FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling, Hopkins showed up and made the new film, Hannibal, immensely better than its predecessor, The Silence of the Lambs. Most film critics won't agree, but that's nothing to worry about.

Three things help make Hannibal better than "Silence." Hopkins gets to play Lecter on the loose, unconfined to a cell. Giancarlo Giannini is in the film. And Julianne Moore, who replaces Foster, is a superior actress.

Silence, as filmed by Jonathan Demme, was a souped-up G-man Perils of Pauline procedural, where an alabaster Foster as Starling is snatched out of the FBI Academy as a cadet and thrown by her superiors into an encounter with Lecter, whose mindfucking skills are Olympian in nature. Starling is sent to get Lecter's help in tracking down a serial killer who is skinning young girls alive. The two stories, Lecter's mindfucking of Starling with her partial resistance and partial submission, and the hunt for the girl skinner, twirl around one another in a nice double helix until the girl skinner is caught, by Starling, before he can skin his next victim, and Lecter escapes.

Ridley Scott came in to direct Hannibal because Demme thought that the sequel was too grisly, and it's a good thing, because Scott brings the predator and prey suspense to a pitch that is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

Hannibal begins with an ordinary enough action sequence. A drug raid led by Starling sours and the automatic weapons come out in a brutal and claustrophobic shoot-up in an outdoor fish market. Plot contrivances have an innocent Starling left hanging as the scapegoat for the deadly business, but she is rescued from the FBI's administrative torture through the political influence of Mason Verger, played by Gary Oldman, a wealthy victim of Lecter who cut his own face off after Lecter drugged him and urged him to do so.

Starling is reassigned, through the machinations of Verger, to the Lecter case, which after ten years had been put on the back burner.

Then begins a sequence in Italy with Giannini playing Police Inspector Pazzi. Lecter has taken up residence in Florence under the name of Dr. Fell, and is maneuvering to get himself appointed as curator of an art library. Pazzi meets Lecter while investigating the timely disappearance of the previous curator.

Giannini, with restless gravity, holds the screen with a force equal to that of Hopkins. Grounded in the natural anxiety of an everyday man hitting the back edge of middle age, his Inspector Pazzi makes a grab for his main chance, the $3 million reward that Verger has offered for Lecter.  And it becomes part of a cat and mouse game with Lecter that spans a series of excruciatingly tense scenes.

Because Giannini's Pazzi is so substantial, earthy, and world weary, the menace posed to him by Hopkin's Lecter soon rises like a silent flood and fills the screen with apprehension and dread. Lecter can smell every move that's being made against him. He can feel Pazzi's greed for the reward. His feral senses begin to filter the light in every scene, whether he is in the scene or not, both during the Florence sequence and throughout the rest of the film. This is the overpowering potential of Lecter on the loose as realized by Hopkins.

Giannini is the catalyst for Hopkins' performance (though not the motivation for his character), and once catalyzed, Hopkins infuses the film with Lecter's evil and then forces the audience to laugh at Lecter's jokes, as if psychopathic murder, in the end, is all in good fun, if only the murderer is an able comedian.

Psychopaths can be a genial lot. They exude charm, at least, and often excitement. They always have a little secret, and that secret is that you really want to be their victim. You really want to do what they want you to do, and if they should need to kill you, well, you deserved that, of course.

Serial killers are sort of psychopaths deluxe who, in addition to having no conscience, kill compulsively. Most of our famous domestic American serial killers were drips, however. Ted Bundy, who gained some notoriety as a charm merchant, was really a transparent drip, who got too much play for being intelligent, when he was in fact not very bright at all. John Wayne Gacy was a farcical slob. Jeffrey Dahmer, who chopped up his victims and practiced cannibalism, came off as plain as toast with a personality as dreary as the sullen drunk he was.

Hannibal Lecter is in another category, and not merely because he is fictional. He is not simply without conscience, he's very pleased to be without it, and equally pleased that its absence has made all the more room for his oversized intellect. He's able to think several moves ahead of both his prey and his pursuers, who are often one and the same. To that are added the physical senses of a wolf and a sense of humor that would have dropped the members of the the Algonquin Roundtable to their knees in hysterical laughter. What you have is a monster who "likes to eat only the rude, whenever possible."

And out of that last conceit Lecter shapes his sense of honor, which takes form again in this film as his affection for Starling. He respects her, maybe even has a crush on her.

The problem of what to do with a character like Lecter was handled in Silence of the Lambs by keeping him where people who eat people belong, in an asylum for the criminally insane. So Lecter is safely confined during Silence until he escapes at the end. He is on display in that film as a sick curiosity, fascinating in that context, a caged maniac around whom the rest of the story can orbit.

In Hannibal the challenge has added dimensions, with Lecter free, out here, hiding in plain sight. Hopkins uses the opportunity to its full advantage without stepping on his earlier performance, and along with director Scott and actors Moore and Giannini, creates the film that people will think of first when they think of the Lecter character specifically or embodied evil in general.

Moore's performance as Starling is many notches above Foster's. She does a seamless job establishing continuity with Foster's portrayal and then adds some acting, something missing from Foster's version of the same character, which so mystified the film world that it gave her an Oscar for it. Moore is just as distant and withdrawn as Foster was, but is not mechanical and she seems to be breathing oxygen like the rest of us. (It's difficult to assess a superior performance when the one it is by necessity compared to was given the film world's highest honor but really wasn't very good.)

Hopkins also got an Oscar the first time out for a less complex performance in a lesser film, but he doesn't need an Oscar for this performance. It's a work of genius, and it's going to get something much more valuable: it will stand the test of time.

© Union Square Journal 2001

Previously by Malone...

Reagan's Two Terrible Mistakes (02/06/01)

The Return of the Hero (01/19/01)

The Hero of Chappaquiddick (01/11/01)

Real Millennium Strange (01/03/01)

Smoke 'em if you got 'em (12/21/00)

Union Square Station (12/11/00)

Union Square Station (12/3 back to 11/24/00)