THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
I watched it in boxers with a nice T-shirt. Fft fft fft fft!
Some movies have one little moment, one line or one shot, that sticks with you for years. The Silence Of The Lambs contains one such shot, which never fails to sicken, horrify, and scare me when I bring it to mind: the discovery of a fingernail embedded in a wall. No one little moment of any other film has quite devastated me like that did. That comes closer to giving me the real-life equivalents of those feelings (y'know, the feeling you get when you get bad news on the phone) than anything in a book or a movie ever has.
I wish I owned this one in widescreen; instead, I have a crappy EP tape. But even a crappy EP tape can?t hide how good this movie is.
Based on the novel of the same title by Thomas Harris (the followup to his Red Dragon, filmed as Manhunter by Michael Mann), The Silence Of The Lambs stars Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee recruited by a higher-up with an eye on her (Scott Glenn) for an unusual assignment. There's some nutjob out there nicknamed Buffalo Bill (who partially skins his victims), and if the police weren't at their wits' end, we wouldn't have a movie. So she is to go into a maximum-security mental institution, take the elevator down to the deep, dark, bottom floor, not carved right out of the rock but it may as well be (a lot of movie mental institutions have these), and ask the advice of the guy they keep at the end of the hall: the baddest of the bad, the prime minister of the sinister, the reigning king of brilliant cannibal psychopaths, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).
There's much disagreement over who makes the better Lecter; Hopkins, or Brian Cox, who played him in Manhunter. My pick's gotta be Hopkins, mostly because Lecter is an evil genius, and Hopkins had more fun with the "evil" part. Cox captured a great essence of detached intelligence, but to the point of complete disinterest in the people around him. Now, this isn't particularly far removed from the most ludicrously intelligent people I know; arrogant assholes, told by everybody how special and gifted they are since they were two, afraid that if you breathe near them they might catch "stupid", unable to imagine the merit of the considerable mental resources that others can draw upon that can't be defined within their razor-thin parameters of what constitutes a worthy level of intelligence. Still, not something I'd care to watch on screen, even if the guy is a cannibal maniac. And it doesn't help that he inexplicably ends half of his sentences with his mouth hanging open like a slack-jawed yokel. What's with that, anyway?
Hopkins shows no such disinterest; his Lecter taking a fiendish but quiet sort of glee in others' fear of him, even when he's encased in this apparently inescapable cage where he can't get at anybody. Being able to enter others' minds - no matter how metaphorical that intrusion is - is as close to an escape as he can manage, and until he can pull off the real thing, that's good enough for him. Hopkins gives Lecter enough humor and charm to become an anti-hero of sorts, but never tries conning the audience into actually believing that he's a standup guy (i.e. he's not one of those guys who'll cut off your head and eat your intestines like a big rope of link sausages but he'd never, ever tell a lie). Volumes have been written about this performance; there's not much more for me to add.
Hopkins presence in the film is so enormous - less scenery-chewing than scenery-obscuring - that it's easy to overlook the other performances, notably Foster's. Starling is written as a woman alone in the world she's put herself into, beset at every term by men's glances of stark disapproval or thinly-disguised horniness. (well, almost alone - there's her roommate and fellow student, Ardilia Mapp, played by foxy Kasi Lemmons, not given much to do in the film) Starling shows the pluck and bravery of somebody who has repeatedly learned the consequences of letting boys be boys, and proves herself to be a worthy sort-of adversary to Lecter.
Note her first scene with Lecter; she actually manages to catch him completely off-guard with her calm candor regarding his own crimes. (the ever-so-slightly surprised look on his face when after he says that he never took a trophy of his victims like many serial killers do, she says "No, you ate yours." He's used to people treating him with fear and reverence - she treats him like a straightforward subject.) Her willingness to let Lecter "enter her head" despite her boss's warning suggests no small amount of courage and faith in her own mental faculties - faith later proven to be well-founded.
The hunt for Buffalo Bill isn't QUITE everything one might hope it to be - there are some contrivances here, notably that death's-head moth that makes its way onto the poster. Still, it's a rousing, suspenseful trip from Lecter's basement cell to Bill's cavernous basement lair; particularly near the climax, when various elements are juggled beautifully (the hostage taking a hostage, the doorbell, the stalking in the dark).
There are a few more minor problems here - like the discovery of some pictures of a half-naked woman, which does nothing noticeable for the movie other than maybe to cue Starling (and the viewer) to the notion of skin which is about to become important. Seems to me that in any investigation of a killer like Buffalo Bill, skin would always be forefront in one's mind. And what's with that big tub of crap in Bill's house? But details this trivial only show up when you're looking for them, hard. What's good about this movie is so astonishingly good, that I almost feel ashamed of myself for trying to hack away at the film's merit by pointing out the tub of crap.
The script, by Ted Tally, seems to me like the peak of the form of adaptation. Everything from the book that really mattered was kept, the chaff (one official's stonewalling in providing information, too much time given to a senator) was cut, and the liberties taken (Starling not originally informed of why she was sent in to interview Lecter, for example) smart and fitting. I do kind of wish that more of the relationship between Lecter and the only person he really respects, the orderly Barney, was kept, but we can't have everything on our wish lists, can we?
Jonathan Demme directed this one, scarcely ever showing the slightest inkling towards more work in the genre, unless you count Beloved, which most people don't. For that matter, his next movie, Philadelphia, seemed very much constructed as an apology of sorts to the gay lobbies who were offended by this film's portrayal of homosexuals. Despite the fact that this film doesn't actually have any homosexuals in it. (shaking head)
The Silence Of The Lambs raked in a big wad of cash, and swept the Oscars, quite remarkable for a horror movie (marketed, however, as a "psychological thriller"), released in February, no less, which is about ten months longer than Academy voters' memories can usually be expected to last. It became enough of a cultural phenomenon to warrant front-page articles when it looked like the sequel to the BOOK was going to be published, something you don't see a whole lot of. Harris has since released the sequel, Hannibal, an excellent book that will hopefully make an excellent film (last word was Ridley Scott would be directing). I do have to wonder how the screenwriter will work in the fact that in the books, Lecter has six fingers on one hand, an item that is vital to setting into motion the events of Hannibal. (in neither Manhunter nor this film is Lecter seen to have anything other than the standard compliment of digits)
This movie is well-deserving of its near-legendary status. It inspired a slew of "psychological thriller" imitators, some very good but many quite bad, some even tossing in the ol' "psychic link", just to make me pray for death. Imagine how much this movie would have sucked if Clarice had a psychic link with Buffalo Bill. Whoever out there is still responsible for making "psychic link" movies needs to be bludgeoned with a copy of this film, still in the steel can.
Trivia note: if my copy of Michael Slade's Burnt Bones is to be believed, the "geographic profiling" program briefly mentioned in this movie did not exist yet at the time, and would not for another six years.