Hannibal
Everyone’s A Cynic
Sometimes, the best part of the movie is the part when you walk out of the movie theater.
I am not talking here about bad movies, necessarily, although it is a pleasure to walk out of a truly bad movie; a sheer, pure act of defiance with no attendant consequences can be a beautiful thing. No, sometimes the best part of a good movie is the way you feel after the movie is done. A really good movie plucks at your chest, and when you’re walking out, you can sometimes feel those reverberations stirring your heart, over and over again. I felt it when I walked out of the Cineplex Odeon on Valley Mills Drive in Waco after seeing The Princess Bride for the first time, luxuriating in the warm, happy glow of a perfect moviegoing experience. I felt it with a near-explosive force on the 183 flyover coming back from the Arbor in north Austin after seeing Rushmore, and how the movie hit me like a delayed-action bomb. I felt it most recently like bubbles in my chest coming out of the old Paramount Theater in downtown Austin after seeing State and Main, with the giddy pleasure of the audience lifting me up.
And I remember walking out of Silence of the Lambs at the brand-new Cinemark multiplex in South Grand Prairie, noticing that the rain had just stopped, and taking note of the famous poster for that movie, which now made much more sense. “Disturbing,” I thought then, and I continue to think now. Silence of the Lambs was a groundbreaking movie, setting the tone for the thrillers and chillers of the next decade. None of its successor movies, though, would have characters as interesting, as compelling as Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, or would have such a deep supporting cast (Scott Glenn, particularly) or would be as well and as honestly shot. It was a special movie, and still is.
I walked out of Hannibal a little less than an hour ago; I doubt if that memory will stick with me very long at all.
If I felt anything walking out of Hannibal, it was a sense of appreciation of the sheer artistry of it all. I speak not of the artistry of Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore, although both do creditable jobs. I speak not of the artistry of director Ridley Scott, although he doesn’t add much for ill or for good, in my book. I speak not of the artistry of author Thomas Harris, whose grisly and masterfully detailed book is the basis for the movie.
No, if artistry there be in Hannibal, it is supplied by the able hands of David Mamet and Steven Zallian, who have worked hard to plane away the extraneous material in the book, to sand down the rough edges, to remove the splinters with deft handiwork. After reading the novel, I suspected that Harris didn’t really want the third Hannibal Lecter novel made into a movie. It was too gruesome, too evil, with an ending that all but foreclosed the possibility of ever making a film appearance. Adapting Hannibal for the screen was a challenge, and I don’t know of anyone outside of Mamet or Zallian who could have met that challenge.
The script succeeds most beautifully in modifying the book’s bloodcurdling conclusion, but I am honor-bound not to reveal the ending of neither the book or the movie, so I will present another example. In the book, Clarice Starling tracks down Hannibal Lecter through his love for certain gourmet items; wine, caviar, etc. It’s a device that worked well in the novel, but not so well onscreen. Mamet and Zallian instead devised a charmingly goofy little scene where perfume company testers identified Lecter’s location through sniffing out the traces of the unique scent of his hand cream that lingered on a letter.
There are quite a few other clever touches that drew my admiration; a segue where the sound of an Italian fountain turns into the sound of typing keys, a transition from a recording of one of the great Lecter lines from Silence of the Lambs to a sweeping view of Florence, a photograph on the walls of Starling’s office that is lifted not from Silence of the Lambs but from Harris’s first Lecter book, Red Dragon, the way that the pigeons line up in the opening credits. Students of the adapted screenplay should read the book carefully before watching the movie, but anyone else shouldn’t bother; the movie does a much better, more compact, more believable job of telling the story.
The story, though, is the problem. The beating heart of Silence of the Lambs was not Lecter or Starling but the character of Catherine Martin, the plucky Senator’s daughter, stuck in the bottom of the well in Buffalo Bill’s nightmare basement. There are no innocent lives at stake here. Everyone’s a cynic, everyone is playing a game. Even Starling’s mission to capture Lecter has the feel of an academic exercise, there’s no passion in the way that her part is written. There’s no intensity, no surprises, no suspense in Hannibal, it has none of the things that made Silence of the Lambs so great.
Hannibal is not a bad film, though, but a disappointing one. There is a lot to like outside of the Mamet/Zallian screenplay, most notably the work of Giancarlo Giannini (an Oscar nominee in 1976, would you believe?) as a corrupt Italian police inspector. The makeup job on Lecter’s nemesis is very good, so is the way that his ultimate fate is decided. Julianne Moore is superb as a disappointed, brittle Clarice Starling; one imagines that (to borrow a line from my main man Scott Turow) that if you were to lick her skin, the taste would be bitter. And then there is Hopkins.
I don’t know how you’ll feel or what you’ll say when you talk about Hannibal. I don’t think you’ll feel disturbed, bothered, or shocked. I also don’t think you’ll feel surprised or elated or even entertained. I can say this, though; however you feel, you won’t remember that feeling or this movie for any great length of time.