Hannibal

by Sam Adams

The feeling that grips you as you watch Hannibal isn’t the fear of the film’s ferocious, cannibalistic serial killer. It’s the fear that your memory is being preyed upon, that something you hold dear is being savaged. It’s more than a matter of Hannibal simply being a bad movie; there are plenty of those, and you get over it. It’s a matter of it being a bad movie with the power to destroy a very good one. The last thing you would want is to return to The Silence of the Lambs and have its carefully controlled images befouled by Hannibal’s clumsy, over-calculated theatrics. But midway through Hannibal you realize you’re in luck: Nothing this movie does can touch the original.

I say "original" even though Silence isn’t technically the first Hannibal Lecter movie — that would be Manhunter (1986), adapted from Silence and Hannibal author Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon— but because it’s the inevitable benchmark. Directed by Jonathan Demme and adapted by Ted Tally — both of whom passed on Hannibal, along with original star Jodie Foster — Silence sucked up accolades on its way to winning five Oscars. More importantly for the purposes of Hannibal, it also took in $130 million at the box office, all but guaranteeing a sequel should Thomas Harris ever get around to writing one.

Harris, of course, took his time, although having read Hannibal you have to wonder what, other than counting money, he could have been doing all those years. (Certainly not honing his prose style.) Among other things, this means that Hannibal opens a full decade after Silence. In the interim, FBI Agent Clarice Starling (played this time by Julianne Moore) has watched a promising career go nowhere, and a dialogue scrap tells us she’s had and lost a husband and children as well. The innate sadness Moore brings to the role (and, really, to all of her roles) tells the tale of dreams unfulfilled, of a woman who pores over pictures of murder victims by day and Gucci ads by night. Though Moore, unlike Foster, actually hails from the South, she has too much hardwired elegance to be believed as ambitious "poor white trash"; hers are the ills of the bourgeoisie (as in Short Cuts or The End of the Affair), not those of a dirt-poor Appalachian.

Time has passed for Hannibal Lecter as well. In the years since his escape, he’s settled into a new life in Florence, and though he’s still vicious as a snake when cornered, it seems as if he’s slowed down his pace. He is as we saw him last in Silence, clad in Panama hat and sunglasses, grinning like the cat that ate the canary. His peace is ruptured, though, by the wealthy Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), who turns out to be the only victim of Lecter’s to survive. A sex offender sent to Lecter for treatment, Verger was drugged and convinced to flay his own face and feed it to his dogs. What’s left of him looks like a plastic doll that’s been left in the stove too long.

So as Starling’s being hounded out of the FBI (by Ray Liotta’s venomous would-be Senator), Lecter’s being hounded by Verger’s minions. (Verger has a rather gruesome fate in mind for him; let’s just say it involves carnivorous pigs.) Dramatic as well as box office imperatives demand that Starling and Lecter be forced together, but logic prevents that happening until Hannibal is nearly two hours old. What we get while we’re waiting is a lot of run-chase-catch, periodically enlivened with spectacularly sanguinary effects.

But here’s where Hannibal could have learned a lesson from its forerunner. What’s scary isn’t what you see, it’s what you don’t see. Director Ridley Scott (hot off his Gladiator triumph) has a flair for flashy spectacle, but little patience for intense dramatics; Lecter and Starling’s longest conversation occurs while the two are chasing each other around Union Station on cell phones. (It’s the best idea in Steve Zaillian’s otherwise uninventive script, as Starling uses background noise to try and track Lecter’s location.) Scott’s lust for motion bleeds Lecter of his vitality, though, turning psychological drama into an action movie with aspirations. It’s not so much that the story’s not told as that there’s not much story to tell.

See the trailer!