February 9, 2001 | It’s been ten years since an infamous psychiatrist with a taste for human entrails escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane in The Silence of the Lambs After all this time, you’ve got to wonder: What’s cooking with Dr. Hannibal Lecter? Or perhaps a better question would be: Who’s being cooked by the good doctor?
Hannibal, a sleekly creepy sequel to the Oscar-winning Silence, suggests that the best way for an infamous mass murderer to lie low is to hide in plain sight. Provided, of course, that he’s sighted only in another country.
The new film finds Lecter – once again played by Anthony Hopkins with the insinuating purr of a menacing Liberace — surviving and thriving under an assumed name amid the moodily scenic splendors of Florence. Posing as Dr. Fell, a distinguished art scholar, he is poised to fill a fortuitously vacant position as curator for local museum. (The previous curator – ahem! – mysteriously disappeared without a trace.) But even as he wallows in luxury and respectability, Lecter remains discontent, unfulfilled: He misses the thrill of the chase. Which explains why he responds with more elation than annoyance when he finds that, back home in the United States, he has regained his rightful place of dishonor on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
Indeed, Lecter can scarcely restrain his enthusiasm when he discovers special agent Clarice Starling is back on his case. In Silence of the Lambs, Starling (then played by Jodie Foster) sought Lecter’s assistance in apprehending another serial killer, thereby forging a perverse psychological bond – not exactly love, but something more complex than mere fascination – between herself and the imprisoned doctor. In Hannibal, Starling (now played by Julianne Moore, who does her darnedest to sound just like Foster) is a decade older, wiser and more case-hardened. (No kidding: She has earned a place in the Guinness Book of Word Records as the female FBI agent who has shot and killed the most people.) But Starling still gets all misty-eyed and weak-kneed at the mention of Lecter’s name – and even more so at the sound of his voice.
Obviously, she’s attracted to the sheer immensely of the evil he represents. And as for Lecter, well, he’s also attracted to Starling. Is he drawn to her innocence? Or does he want her as his executioner? (Early on, he indicates as much: “Your job is to craft my doom.”) Either way, it’s safe to say that she may be the only person on Earth who could join Lecter for dinner and not wind up as the main course.
The teasingly symbiotic relationship between Lecter and Starling percolated as a provocative subtext in Silence of the Lambs. Here, however, the relationship is at once far more obvious, and a lot less important.
Structurally, Hannibal – which, like Silence, is based on a book by Thomas Harris – plays like back-to-back episodes of a TV series spin-off in which Lecter is the lead and Starling is a supporting player, sort of a Lt. Gerard to his Richard Kimble. In the hour-long pilot, Lecter savors an extended cat-and-mouse game with a corrupt Italian police detective (the great Giancarlo Giannini, making the most of a thinly written role) who is, quite literally, left hung out to dry. After that, a couple of half-hour segments detail Lecter’s misadventures with two outmatched foes: the fabulously wealthy Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), who was hideously disfigured during a previous close encounter with the doctor; and the snidely sexist Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), a Justice Department honcho who makes the mistake of mistreating Lecter’s favorite FBI agent.
Starling’s prominence in the plot becomes steadily more pronounced as the movie proceeds. And the character is never less than compelling, thanks in large measure to Moore’s delicate balance of steely determination and spooked-out vulnerability. But there’s never any real doubt as to who’s the real star of the show.
Hopkins is at his best when he’s most flamboyant in the movie’s first half, as Lecter – his Borsalino hat tipped at a rakish angle, his expensive topcoat billowing like Dracula’s cape — strolls about Florence with all the haughty confidence of someone who has already read the script, and knows he will come out on top. Once back in the States, Lecter is appreciably less sartorially splendid, and even a tad more conventionally terrifying. But he commands attention with each arched eyebrow, with every grisly wisecrack. “I can assure you,” he tells a dinner guest, “the next course is to die for.” And, of course, it is.
Director Ridley Scott (Gladiator) infuses Hannibal with an ambiance of broodingly languorous decadence, which is altogether appropriate for a film that, at heart, is a darkly comical melodrama about a charismatic serial killer. Here and there, Scott gives us a flash of carnage so gruesome, so unabashedly over the top, you don’t know whether to turn away or laugh out loud. (The climactic dinner scene, which relies heavily on a genuinely shocking special effect, begins as a ghastly horror, then quickly evolves into a ghoulish prank.) And while the screenplay by David Mamet and Steve Zaillian saves the best bon mots for Hopkins, other actors also get to earn ghoulish giggle. Oldman (wearing makeup that makes his head resemble a chafed fist with eyes) explains that, while under the influence, he followed Lecter’s suggestion to slice off his own face. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he rasps.
In The Silence of the Lambs – and before that, in Michael’s Mann’s Manhunter, based on Harris’ novel Red Dragon – Hannibal Lecter appeared only sporadically, mostly to provide ambiguous suggestions and hectoring commentary while a hero battled the forces of darkness. (Brian Cox plays Lecter in Mann’s movie.) In Hannibal, however, the focus remains fixed on the very embodiment of that darkness. The result is a chillingly amoral but thrillingly stylish grand guignol that will satisfy the appetite of anyone who has ever wanted to see more, a lot more, of cinema’s most sardonically erudite bogeyman. You’ll probably hate yourself in the morning — you might not even feel so good about yourself while you’re watching it – but you may find yourself enjoying Hannibal more than you would ever want to admit.
