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Hannibal's Return
Jon's review, continued: This could have been a great movie.
Ridley Scott's Hannibal has all the elements of a classic -- a creepy story, gorgeous cinematography in beautiful locales, one of the world's greatest actors, a director hot off Gladiator (nominated for 12 Oscars last week) and a truly mythic monster, the cultured but cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter.
But Hannibal isn't great. Entertaining, sure, and worth seeing, providing you've got a strong enough stomach for some truly over-the-top gore. Somehow, Ridley Scott lost his footing in the making of this much- ballyhooed sequel. The movie wanders off into too many picturesque but dawdly sub-plots. And the violence is so extreme it becomes almost cartoonish.
WARNING: No outcomes are given away, but skip this next graf if you don't want to know any of the specific blood-and-brains details. I'm including them so that you can decide if you or your loved ones want to buy a ticket:
In this movie, you'll see a man's face get ripped off and fed to a dog, a woman's face gnawed off while she screams. You'll see humans fed to wild boars, a grotesquely-disfigured Lecter victim, a man disemboweled and hung, another garroted grotesquely. Then, one guy's skull is sawed open and the frontal lobe fried and served him for dinner.
It says a lot about the laughable MPAA ratings system that a couple making love can be grounds for an NC-17 rating, while the stuff above only draws an R. The theater where I saw the movie was crammed with little kids. Friends, we live in a loopy country.
Even some of the key people involved with the superior, very chilling Silence Of The Lambs decided to take a pass on this one. The producers had all sorts of trouble getting novelist Thomas Harris to finish his controversial sequel and when he did, both director Jonathan Demme and star Jody Foster gagged and bailed. So it took a decade for Dr. Lecter to make his way back on screen. Except for the ending, Hannibal is surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the book.
Anthony Hopkins is a brilliant choice to star in a contemporary horror film. He's gleeful, charismatic, powerful and truly unnerving. His performance is filled with great touches, like his habit of cheerfully saying "okey-dokey" before he does something horrendous. The big difference between Hannibal and Silence is that the latter was a story about a brilliant and dangerous mind imprisoned behind a mask and locked in a cell; about the very intense intellectual battle of the souls between this psychopath and a dutiful, smart FBI agent. Talk about having your mind messed with. Their conflict, and grudging mutual respect, even admiration, made the story a thriller but also a cold, powerful character study.
Scott seemed to have no patience for that kind of a contest, so he made Hannibal into a straight horror film, albeit one with some genuinely frightening moments, an eerie backdrop and soundtrack and dark and beautiful locations (including, oddly enough, the Virginia estate of the fourth president of the U.S., James Madison, who is somewhere -- maybe nearby -- spinning in his grave).
The movie opens in Washington, D.C., during a botched drug raid for which our heroine in unjustly blamed, and then moves onto Florence, which Scott uses to great affect. The doctor is in hibernation, pursuing a job as a curator of a medieval library, where he gives creepy lectures about unpleasant history. A local cop figures out who he is and decides to go after him for the reward (this guy is such deadmeat from the minute he shows up in the movie, he seems to know it).
The movie then -- after too long a delay -- flirts with the idea that Hannibal and his pursuer, played this round by Julianne Moore, are or might be attracted to one another. The other twist is that Moore has been humiliated by her slimy superiors in the FBI and Justice Department, a fate that draws Hannibal even closer to her. Gary Oldman plays the horrendously maimed Lecter-victim pulling strings behind-the-scenes to get vengeance on the good doc. This too seems to go over the top.
Too much of the action is over before Lecter and Agent Clarice Starling even get near each other, which takes some of the steam out of their confrontation. Besides, there's no real pursuit or chemistry between the two, intellectual or otherwise. In Silence, Clarisse was fighting for control of her psyche. Here, she's sometimes seems to be almost robotically battling out of reflex, maybe to keep her pension, or out of blind loyalty to the FBI field manual. She never says.
Mostly, Moore plays a variation of Agent Scully pursuing a meta-psychopath. She is so humorless, resolute, ethical and unwavering she becomes one-dimensional. It's fine to see a brave woman starring in an action movie, but does she have to have nerves of titanium? The guy is truly a horror show, and Superman would be creeped out around him. Clarisse could at least wince or blink. Contrast this role with Michelle Yeoh's in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Both women are tough, but Yeoh shows enormous vulnerability and pain, which makes her seem all the braver.
Dr. Lecter is, in many ways a riot, the movie's saving grace. The monsters in many classic horror films -- Dracula, Frankenstein, kill out of some uncontrollable instinct. Lecter just seems to hate vulgarity and rudeness, punishing both with unimaginable cruelty. Hopkins plays this character with relish and joy, one perfect note after another.
Unless you're queasy about the brains and intestines and people eaten alive (those scenes are bizarre, and now always brief) the movie has its moments. You will actually feel a chill go up your spine now and again, not a small accomplishment for any movie, even one that falls somewhat short of its great potential.
Besides, Hannibal is a bona fide mega-smash, racking up one of the top opening weekend grosses in Hollywood history. This idea strikes a deep chord with moviegoers -- the next film in the franchise is reportedly already in the works. So the culinary adventures of Dr. Lecter is likely to turn into a regular cinematic event, like the Bond films, Batman or Star Wars series. If you want to get in on it, might as well start at the beginning.
timothy's take:
"Guts in, or guts out?" First of all, please note: Hannibal is not for the squeamish, probably not to watch with your parents, almost certainly not a good first-date movie (though it takes all kinds), and not a good-guys-win-in-the-nick-of-time story. It's a ghoulish, macabre, perverse and disturbing film with the detective work, plot twists and horrifascinating feel of The Silence of the Lambs. That said, please note, if you've read the book, you may find a few corners cut.
As much of the Thomas Harris novel Hannibal as Ridley Scott, Thomas Harris and David Mamet could squeeze into 2 hours and 20 minutes, they did. Though the film would be comprehensible and probably just as horrifying to a viewer unfamiliar with "Silence," it makes much more sense to see Hannibal as a second act than a story in isolation. If you are one of the three people who have not seen the first film, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter (M.D.) is a long-imprisoned serial murderer with a penchant for eating his victims; Lecter agrees to help capture another serial killer to aid new FBI ageny Clarice Starling, but when betrayed by Starling's superiors escapes and begins his culinary pursuits anew. Starling pursues Lecter, as one of the few people who in some sense understands his twisted sense of civility, and on more than one occasion finds that his victims weren't quite innocent either.
Besides that background, three converging plotlines launch the story of Hannibal. Briefly: Agent Starling becomes the scapegoat for a failed drug-raid which was supposed to be an example of interdepartmental cooperation between the FBI and D.C. police; as a result she is publicly humiliated by a jealous bureacrat named Paul Krendler (the well-chosen Ray Liotta); An Italian policeman named Pazzi, played by Giancarlo Giannini, has by luck fallen onto Hannibal's trail when he becomes suspicious of the cultured interim curator of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, an art scholar named "Dr. Fell"; and finally, recluse millionaire Mason Verger, Lecter's first victim ("the rich one -- the only one who survived."), has devised a method of trapping and killing Lecter as gruesome if not as artful as one of the good doctor's own schemes. The special effects used to create Verger's face are truly disturbing, but apparently under that twisted visage is Gary Oldman, always good at being bad.
These threads converge more neatly than I'd feared they might; Ridley Scott does an excellent job of tying together the story elements with judicious transitions and just-enough background to make each character fall into plac. The directing and cinematography throughout, in fact, are remarkably restrained -- no scene sticks out like quite like the Pittsburgh-filmed cage scene in "Silence," or the apocalyptic Los Angeles cityscape of Bladerunner. Still, Scott knows how to do gore. It's true that there's less detail in the movie than I might like -- for instance, about how Lecter came to be in Florence, to speak Italian, or to be so learned in matters of Rennaissance history and symbolism -- but subtlety is perhaps preferably to overexplanation in this case; Lecter works in mysterious ways, and as scenes in both movies hint, is a multilingual world traveler who could probably obtain such an academic position in any city in the world.
Anyone who liked The Silence of the Lambs for Jodie Foster's portrayal of the up-from-nothing Agent Starling ("white trash made good") is in for a surprise: Julianne Moore stuns. [Note: it looks like I have a slight disagreement with Jon on this point. Oh, well -- or perhaps, "Okey Dokey." -- t.] I was perhaps set up for disappointment, but this is one of the most graceful casting transitions in film history. No one besides Foster herself could better evince a slightly more seasoned, less hesitant Agent Starling -- still dedicated to her job, still dedicated to changing Hannibal Lecter's meal plan. Right down the set of her jaw and painfully-tamed southern accent, Starling is Moore is Starling.
Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, though, probably could not have been replaced. Hopkins' cultured phrasing and limpid gaze make Lecter's sinister, maniacal calm all the spookier, twisting the viewer uncomfortably through the gates which separate civilized, humane behavior from ... well, from gutting and eating the census taker who asks a rude question, or taking an autopsy saw and -- never mind. Anthony Hopkins obliges with a performance every bit as magnetic and nerve-jarring as the Hannibal Lecter of 10 years ago. (I'm waiting for a parody sketch on Saturday Night Live to combine his roles as C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands with his two runs as Hannibal.)
There are some subtle (and unsubtle) differences between the book and the movie, mostly the exclusion of certain characters and subplots -- Clarisse's roommate is nowhere to be seen, for instance, and neither is Mason Verger's vengeful sister or her lover, nor yet the children brought to Verger for immoral purposes. (Even in a movie which ends the way this one does, there are some things you'd rather not even see on film -- I doubt many viewers will clamor for a Directors Cut DVD featuring the unseen child-abuse scenes.) The way that Verger expires in the book, and the issue of his issue, may have been too much for the studio to handle, never mind potentially nauseous theaterfulls of viewers.
Those ommissions, though, are all acceptable concessions to brevity; I wish Scott, Harris and Mamet had found room to squeeze in just a few of the cut scenes, though, like the book's flashbacks about Lecter's childhood, which provided at least some explanation for Lecter's decidely anti-social eating habits. Without them, Lecter comes off again as an anthrophagous Moriarty whose victim-eating is just an arbirary manifestation of evil, though in this movie as well as in the first his sense of propriety is remarked on and wondered about. At one point, Starling asks the sinister, aggressive Krendler whether he wonders why Lecter dines on his victims. Krendler at that point ought perhaps have screwed on his thinking cap a little tighter, because his ambition to punish Starling's hard work with humiliation triggers the ever-watchful Lecter's passion for just desserts.
Still, the machinations of surviving Lecter victim Mason Verger are perhaps the most important part of the story, as they tie together both Starling (whom Verger tries to make bait for Lecter with political manipulation) and the avaricious policeman Pazzi, who attempts to cash in on the reward that Verger has established for Lecter's live capture. Pazzi ends up cashing out rather than cashing in, in what is probably the film's second-most horrifying murder, and the only one which shows off the doctor at this thoughtful, didactic self rather than killing for mere expedience. Verger's elaborate plans to attract and capture Lecter are not so he can impress upon him the somewhat off-kilter lessons in applied Christianity he apparently picked up as a child from the religious camps his father founded; instead (to be direct), he plans to cast him before swine. Specifically, before a gang of large, specially-bred, man-eating swine from Sardinia. Verger has even prepared a special area of his vast estate just to watch the spectacle of Lecter being ripped apart from the feet up. Since the damage done to Verger -- self-inflicted, though under the hypnotic effects of the much-younger Dr. Lecter -- involved his face being eaten by dogs, there is a kind of symmetry to this plot.
Needless to say, Agent Starling, though dedicated to ending Hannibal Lecter's killing pattern, cannot countenance meeting evil with evil in the manner Verger intends, and despite being removed from the FBI while under investigation for alleged misconduct in the drug raid which opens the movie, arrives in time to influence the outcome of Verger's scheme, which is not to say the swine go hungry.
In fact, hunger is probably not the first thought of viewers shuffling out of the theater after Hannibal; the final scenes differ from the book's ending enough that speaking of them in any detail would give away more plot than I'm comfortable with. Suffice it to say that vegetarianism may just have a new posterboy, and Lecter himself prefers just about anything to being trapped in a prison cell, or even in handcuffs.
p.s. And though not listed on the Hannibal page on IMDB, isn't that Ajay Naidu (Samir from Office Space) making a quick appearance as a perfume expert?
p.p.s. Note how the ending of the movie
seems to be subliminally influenced by a vegetarian cookbook -- that can't have been accidental;)
It says a lot about the laughable MPAA ratings system that a couple making love can be grounds for an NC-17 rating, while the stuff above only draws an R. The theater where I saw the movie was crammed with little kids. Friends, we live in a loopy country.
Recently, when a fuss erupted over the US MPAA ratings board giving the British feelgood family film, Billy Elliot, an R rating, the head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, said of his job that he gets way more letters about bad language than he gets about people getting shot in the face. Ergo, a film like Billy Elliot will be rated R because someone says the word 'fuck', while a film like Nutty Professor 2, complete with a grandmother giving implied oral sex (with teeth out) gets away with a PG-13. It's why Lost World, complete with people being ripped apart by dinosaurs for our amusement, is rated PG-13, while a film like Requiem For A Dream, with it's important message, is sent to unscreenable land when it gets an NC-17.
See, the real problem with censorship isn't that some board says 'this is bad', it's that a lot of decisions come from what that board says. A rating should be a guide, given so we don't accidentally stumble with mom into a porno film, but these days a rating dictates whether a film can be seen by the largest slice of the audience (kids, teens and by extension, families), which dictates how many screens it goes on (suburban cinemas don't want to have eight R rated films showing at once) and, in these days of video store monopolies, whether you can even rent one of these films in your local Blockbuster. It's not a question of seeing that one cut second of a guy getting a knife in the throat, it's a question of even seeing the movie.
Now filmmakers know this. And in fact, many filmmakers have to sign a contract guaranteeing that they'll deliver a cut of the film to receive a certain rating, before even a scene is shot. I know from experience, having worked on a film where scenes were changed on the day to avoid an NC-17 rating, that what is supposed to be a guide for the viewer is becoming a guide for the filmmaker.
And the worst thing is, these changes are completely arbitrary. We all know the stories of Orgazmo being hit with an NC-17 even though there was less frontal nudity than in Boogie Nights. We've heard the tales of the South Park movie being told to remove the word 'motherfucker', replacing it with 'unclefucker' and having no further problems. And then there's American Psycho, which after submitting a film full of chainsaw and sledgehammer murders was told to remove one shot from a sex scene.
It's ridiculous. And it doesn't save anyone from anything.
Censorship is bad. It doesn't work. Nobody shot up Columbine High School because Leonardo DiCaprio wore a trenchcoat once, they did it because they could drive downtown and pick up a small sack of heavy weapons for $29.95. Sure, Leo dictated their fashion choice, but he didn't load the cartridges for them.
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
At one time (and for all I know they are) there was a big name organization that rated websites (RASCi or something like that). I remember this was just after MS Frontpage was announced, but before it came out... IE 3.0 was still new, iirc. I was running a Rocky Horror fan website (and still am), and figured I'd rate it with the origanization.
I had assumed that I'd get the equivelent of a PG-13 rating (the movie was rated R in the mid 70s) for profanity and simulated sex (no intentional nudity). Wow was I wrong... I got the harshest, worst, absolutely abysmal rating possible. Way beyond hard core porn.
So, like any hacker, I started playing with the system... punching in different values, I could not get the really bad rating. Graphic penetration movie clips with sound of gay sexual torture was the only thing that approached the horrible rating that I got.
Then I realized it - in the movie, the alien mad scientist kills Eddie, a biker (played by Meat Loaf), and later serves dinner - which is revealed to everyone's horror to be Eddie (alien culture clash, or revenge? Motive is unclear).
A depiction of cannibalism, even in a high camp musical, instantly garnered the worst possible rating with no mitigating factors allowed. A movie that is viewed in the theater weekly by tens of thousands of people (and that the MPAA has admitted would not get a R if released today) is judged to be far too obscene for the internet. Interesting, eh? That's the kind of thinking of the people that want to control the content of the internet - don't forget it. I won't.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
1. Starling catches Lecter.
2. Starling fails to catch Lecter (movie version).
3. Lecter catches starling, eats her.
4. Lecter catches starling (book version).
#1 and #2 are what everyone expected (the question after the book was released was "do they catch him?"). For this very reason Harris wouldn't have done either. People would have hated #3 even more than what he actually did. Really, given Harris' history the book ends in just about the only way possible.
Harris does not write about nice people. The "tooth fairy" in Red Dragon chose his victims because they were happy, well-adjusted families and he wanted to end their happiness as horrifically as possible (and Harris describes his methods in great detail). The villain of silence is building himself a girl suit out of real girls. Mason Verger was a pervert and psycho before he ever met Hannibal Lecter.
In Dragon and Silence Lecter was like a force of nature, the higher power of which the other villains could only be a subset. In Hannibal Harris had to make Lecter human. This was bound to be a disappointment, but without a background and a vulnerability Harris would have had no story. What he did was actually very clever, and not nearly so unbelievable as people seem to think.
Ultimately, Hannibal is no more about Lecter than the other two books; it is about Clarice Starling. She has gone beyond not hearing the lambs, through a cauldron of betrayal that has enabled her to become the butcher. Lecter merely gives her a well-timed push to complete the process. It's really similar to his role in the other two stories, and one of the few ways Harris could have surprised us at all.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]