THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(baumgart@esquire.dpw.com)
The Phantom has always wanted to do a TV-style two-word review, suitable for prominent display on a theater marquee. So how about, "'SILENCE' IS GOLDEN!" Truly, the Phantom feels like Roger Ebert already. But in fairness, Jonathan Demme's new thriller, based on the novel by Thomas Harris, is a knockout, better even than the Phantom himself had hoped for.
Good reviews are always the most difficult kind for the Phantom to write; it's as difficult to be clever when the Phantom is praising something as it is for him to be fair when he's casting another horrible horror film to the wolves. Reviewing a turkey like POPCORN was easy; reviewing SILENCE will be much more difficult. But let's give it a try, starting with the script, based on Thomas Harris' excellent psychological thriller. Harris does psychological thrillers about as well as anyone, and in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS he brought back one of his most memorable characters, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant but insane psychiatrist who we first met in RED DRAGON (which was also turned into a fine, though largely overlooked, film called MANHUNTER by the talented and stylish director of Miami Vice fame, Michael Mann).
Dr. Lecter has the knack of getting inside of people's heads -- and also the rest of their bodies; he wasn't nicknamed "Hannibal the Cannibal" for nothing. Although Lecter was not the focus of RED DRAGON, SILENCE spends most of its time exploring him and his relationship to Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee sent to get Lecter to help an investigation into a series of brutal murders by someone the press has dubbed "Buffalo Bill." Harris' novel spent about as much time with Lecter as it did with Buffalo Bill, and in turning it into a film, Demme's decision to concentrate on Lecter and relegate the scenes involving Bill to the obligatory "final confrontation" at the film's end is an inspired one. Adapting any novel is difficult, if only because it involves reducing what might be a week's worth of entertainment for the average reader to a script which can fit comfortably inside of two hours. But it's even more difficult when the novel spends so much time with three very compelling characters. Given the need to distill Harris' novel down to its essence and yet make SILENCE more than just another run-of-the-mill thriller, Demme chooses to use Buffalo Bill more as a convenient excuse than as a character; although he doesn't ignore Bill altogether, he exists as little more than the subject of Lecter and Starling's conversations -- and the reason they keep having conversations -- until quite near the very end of the film.
Had Demme had lesser actors with which to work, or had Harris' novel been less literate and more exploitative than it was, this decision might well have backfired, since it forces a change in tone -- from exciting manhunt to scenes of static conversation -- that is risky at best. When Michael Mann directed MANHUNTER, he chose to make a straightforward adaptation of Harris' RED DRAGON. In the process, he created a gripping, scary, and effective thriller, but at some level it differed little from the hundreds of other thrillers that had come before it. In that film, an FBI investigator is recalled to help track a serial killer because the FBI knows that he has a knack for thinking like the sociopaths he tracks. Harris spent more time on this theme than did Mann, and as a consequence MANHUNTER is a much more ordinary thriller than is SILENCE. This is not to say that MANHUNTER isn't worth seeing or that it's boring or predictable; on the contrary, Mann fashioned a supremely enjoyable and stylish film from Harris' very good source material. But the focus of that film was very much on the hunt; although Mann spends some time exploring what it means to be able to think like a serial killer, the theme is largely discarded once the film gets going and Mann gets into the heat of the chase.
Demme, however, very nearly discards the heat of the chase in favor of what might be called a very warped MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. Realizing that in Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins he had two exceptional actors, Demme opts to concentrate on their relationship. And from the very first meeting, it's obvious that he made the right choice. Stories involving pretty young investigators and brutal killers are nearly as common in the theaters as they are on television; but thrillers that put a camera motionless in a cell and record the conversations between someone as intense as Hannibal Lecter and someone as determined as Clarice Starling are rare to the point of nonexistence. It occurred to the Phantom that not since John McNaughton's HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER has a filmmaker had the talent and the courage to assume that his audience wasn't full of drooling PREDATOR 2 fans (though the Phantom has yet to meet one, he assumes that they must exist somewhere). To do what he did, Demme had to assume instead that there were real, thinking people out there who would find the tension in the scenes between Lecter and Starling as intense and scary as any standard issue "killer stalking helpless woman through dark basement" scene. Of course, in the end Demme does hedge his bets a bit, but by the time the film changes its focus to Buffalo Bill, everyone in the audience feels lucky to have been able to spend some time with Hannibal and Clarice.
Of course, the best script in the world won't help a film if its actors have less range than their guns. Fortunately, both Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins give all-out performances that are exactly right for what Demme wants to do with the film. When the Phantom first read Harris' novel, he didn't have clear mental pictures of either Clarice Starling or Hannibal Lecter; now that he's seen the film, however, it will be as difficult to picture them as anyone other than Foster and Hopkins as it is to picture anyone other than Alec Guinness as George Smiley when reading John Le Carre's novels. Jodie Foster has the toughest job of it, which is why her performance is so much more impressive. Starling's role throughout the story is very reactive, and she spends much of the film providing a foil for Lecter. But although much of her character development is excised in the film, Foster gives Clarice Starling real substance, and she manages to make Starling not just sympathetic, but a real person to whom the audience has no trouble relating.
Anthony Hopkins, on the other hand, gives a truly brilliant and captivating performance as Hannibal Lecter, one that is every bit as good as Jodie Foster's; it is as much to his credit as it is to Harris' that by the end of the film we feel we "know" Lecter and maybe even like him a little bit. Hopkins stares at Clarice -- and at us -- with a hunger and an intensity that's more than a little unsettling. As Harris wrote the character, Lecter is supposed to be incredibly smart, fast and cool, and Hopkins' Lecter more than lives up to Harris' description. He always looks to us like a coiled spring or an brilliant and self-possessed snake, ready to strike at the first opportunity. And when Demme gets the camera right up into Hopkins' face, we see what Clarice sees -- the slicked back hair, the expressionless face, the dead and unblinking eyes -- and we feel what she feels: that perhaps the thick, bulletproof plastic separating her from Lecter might not be as effective as it first seems. From the very first moments of their first meeting, Lecter gets both Starling and the audience under his spell, and whenever the film returns to Lecter, all thoughts of the rest of the plot or even of any other characters melt away as we become completely absorbed in Hopkins' performance.
That, however, also points out a problem with the film, for as much as we would like to linger with Lecter and Starling and learn more about what makes each of them tick, Demme must inevitably return to what is, after all, the film's plot. Demme is able to pull off these shifts between Lecter and the investigation (using Starling as the link between them) until the film's end, at which time he becomes a prisoner of the need to resolve everything one way or another. As unusual as SILENCE is as a thriller, it is ultimately a mass-market Hollywood film -- once all is said and done, SILENCE is not another HENRY. But the need to return to Buffalo Bill and to provide the film with a satisfactory resolution is but a minor problem, and one that we only notice because the film up until that point had been so exceptional. In MANHUNTER, such resolution seemed perfectly in character, since the film is really about a manhunt; but in SILENCE, the 20 or 30 minutes that Demme needs to force-feed us the shaky plot points and fairly incredible coincidences and contrivances necessary to end the film seems like time stolen from the wonderful, intriguing, and startling Hannibal Lecter -- and from Anthony Hopkins' show-stopping performance.
But that is truly a minor nit to pick. On the whole, SILENCE succeeds both as an adaptation of a well-known and widely-read novel and as a film in its own right. In fact, it's not clear to the Phantom who will enjoy SILENCE more: people who have read the novel or people who haven't. Although the former may enjoy the last half of the film more than the latter -- if only because they won't have to rely on the overly-rushed explanations and the too-brief character sketch of Buffalo Bill -- they will also be at a disadvantage in knowing what to expect from Dr. Lecter. People who see the film first will be going in cold and will be able to enjoy both Hopkins' and Foster's performances without any preconceived ideas or expectations. In any event, at the performance the Phantom attended, it seemed that none of the seven or eight hundred people in the audience was disappointed with the film, and more than a few gave it a round of applause as the credits rolled. The Phantom himself looks forward to seeing it again in the coming weeks; as much as he enjoyed Harris' novel, he thinks he enjoyed Hopkins' performance even more.
What more is there to say? The film is simply excellent and well worth seeing. For phans who haven't yet read Harris' novel, the Phantom recommends that they first see the film, then wait a while and give the novel a try. But if you've already read the novel, see the film anyway, if only to enjoy the film's beautiful and stylish look, Demme's tight and effective direction, and of course Foster and Hopkins' stellar performances. SILENCE is a film to be savored, a true rarity: an "A" picture in a "B" movie genre.
: The Phantom
: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com
: {cmcl2,uunet}! esquire! baumgart
.
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