Two things emerge from seeing Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs: one is that Hannibal Lecter – “Hannibal the Cannibal” – is not as interesting a character as he used to be, and the other is that Ridley Scott is a very uneven director.
Dr Hannibal Lecter was a minor character in Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon (filmed as Manhunter). He took on more life in the novel and film of The Silence of the Lambs, in which he was not quite meant to be the main figure, except that, as embodied by Anthony Hopkins, he stole the show from FBI agent Clarice Starling. Now, in Hannibal, he is unquestionably the protagonist. But is he the same pyscho we know and love?
The urbane, sophisticated serial killer is undeniably fascinating. Hannibal is not some cutrate slasher. He doesn’t just eat people;
he eats selected body parts, and with style – you will recall his famous anecdote in The Silence of the Lambs in which he recounts consuming the liver of a census taker “with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”. Not yer old baked beans from a tin, oh no; and no Tassies to accompany his evil repast.
Lecter is deeply literate – a “lector” is the person who reads the lesson of the day in a Catholic service, so his name hints at high
ritual as well as sly pedagogy. And does it perhaps allude to Baudelaire’s “hypocrite lecteur”, the fickle reader himself or herself? Who is, incidentally, also “my likeness, my brother” – does that mean Hannibal the Cannibal is at least potentially a part of all of us, the nastiest element of human nature?
At any rate, Lecter is a cultured man: in The Silence of the Lambs, he made drawings of Renaissance buildings, and in the new film he has made a home for himself in Florence, where he lectures (indeed) on iconography. Of course, by training he is – how excruciatingly amusing – a psychiatrist. He possesses key insights into the minds of mad killers like himself; he is both quite insane and oddly sane. The slippage from psychiatrist to psychopath is surely one of the qualities that make him so piquant.
But he’s changed. He’s lost some of his moral ambivalence. Whereas in The Silence of the Lambs he was compelling but undeniably horrible (providing the ironic symmetry of that film – one psycho escapes while another is being caught), Hannibal is now mostly charming and quite likeable. He only seems to kill people who deserve to be killed – extortionists and corrupt cops, for instance.
The plot of Hannibal turns on the revenge sought by Mason Verger, one of Lecter’s disgustingly mutilated victims, a paedophile
who somehow avoided dying at Hannibal’s hands, and now intends to exact a terrible vengeance. Here we have a character even more dreadful than Hannibal, and certainly a lot uglier (played by Gary Oldman, even less recogniseable than in The Contender), so we end up unequivocally on Hannibal’s side.
Hopkins seems also to have toned Hannibal down a tad: he still has that intriguingly mid-Atlantic accent, but he is less stylised,
less sibilant. He also doesn’t get lit from below in silent movie villain style, as he was in the previous movie. He’s practically a nice person. Then again, he hasn’t changed as much as his antagonist, Clarice Starling, who was played very well by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, and, in Hannibal, by a rather blank Julianne Moore.
Foster’s Starling was a complex character, driven to succeed as an FBI agent by her sad, poor past; you could sense the tensions in her personality. Her fear, her desperation, quivering beneath her apparent confidence, gave her an extra dimension. Moore’s Starling,
by comparison, is a cool, even cold, achiever – a steely surface with nothing underneath.
And the film itself has a similar machinelike coldness. It looks marvellous – Scott is, if nothing else, a great man for the visuals.
Yet the director who made Gladiator such a viscerally enthralling entertainment gives Hannibal all the suspense of a perfume ad.
Like Scott’s other entirely unthrilling thriller, Someone to Watch over Me, Hannibal just never engages one. It is curiously unexciting throughout. The climax comes and goes, and one thinks, Oh, was that it?
The Silence of the Lambs had its flaws, but it was a good thriller. Hannibal, by comparison (and the comparisons are inevitable), isn’t. It glides along frictionlessly, without dynamic peaks and troughs, as if on a cushion of air – it’s not a movie, it’s a hovercraft.