THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
A film review by Dave Jones
Copyright 1991 Dave Jones
Big disappointment for me. Nope, I had not read the book.
The story would have worked great as a straight documentary, but they tried to play it as a "monster-in-the-house" thriller. As a result, there were more loose ends than you see in a Deal-a-Meal commercial.
The biggest flaw, a real whopper, was that the main bad guy (Anthony Hopkins), after a lengthy escape sequence, simply removed himself from the plot about two-thirds of the way into the film, not to figure in the climax and resolution at all.
In an attempt to smooth this over, the main character (Jodie Foster) *announces* gratuitously to a minor character that the bad guy will not be heard of again, and goes off to deal with bad guy number two.
All the main conflict was based around the heroine trying to get from bad guy number one information about bad guy number two, whom we did not even meet until well into the film. Once she had as much info as she was going to get, about half way into the film, the lengthy escape-sequence contributed absolutely nothing to the plot. The only excuse, a poor one, is that it really happened that way. Of course, I didn't know that, and since he was the genius at psychology, and she the talented beginner, I kept expecting Jodie to be proven wrong -- for the main bad guy to show up when we least expected him. The other shoe never dropped, and I felt very dissatisfied: Wait a minute! Is it over??? Whaaa???
Well, he did get a joke cameo at the very end, after Jodie had vanquished the bogeyman, which she somehow accomplished despite her utter incompetence in the "monster-in-the-house" scene. I still don't know how she offed him in a pitch-dark room, with him wearing infra-red glasses, and carrying a pistol, while she was flailing around helplessly on the floor. Some people in the audience apparently thought it was scary, but I thought it was just dumb. She's supposed to be one of the brightest recent grads of FBI school, and she doesn't know the first thing about hostage situations. Oh well, the monster gave her a second chance to get it right.
Jodie Foster did not turn in nearly as good a performance as she usually does. The high points of the film were Anthony Hopkins's portrayal of the demented psychologist and the creepy images of the insane asylum, although those scenes were marred by an "auditory cue," a deep rumble in the sound-track, which was no doubt intended to make the audience uncomfortable, and which, in my case at least, succeeded. I wonder what Orion Pictures will come up with next: audience thumb-screws to heighten anticipation?
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