Don’t Eat Your Meat
The sins of Hannibal (presumably both the book and the movie, though I’m only going to be talking here about the film) are numerous, and not just limited to placing an intriguing cypher like Hannibal Lecter at the center of the story. Though if you want to revisit that well-worn argument, you could do worse than read author Alec Nevala-Lee’s take on where Thomas Harris (& other like-minded writers) went wrong with promoting their supporting cast. Here’s his big crux:
The primary interest of a fictional character comes from what he does, or doesn’t do, in the story itself, not from what happened to him before the story began. Character comes from action. If you’ve written a compelling character, of course, readers are naturally going to want more backstory, which is great—but that doesn’t mean you should give it.
Which is precisely where Harris went wrong. In Hannibal, and even more so with Hannibal Rising, Harris forgot that his most famous character absolutely needed to remain a mystery.
Cinematically, in Silence of the Lambs and both versions of Red Dragon (while Brett Ratner’s take is pretty OK especially in light of his other work, I’m thinking mostly of Michael Mann’s Manhunter here), Hannibal Lecter is a character whose importance was delineated specifically through his interaction with these stories’ protagonists. The reason he became such a magnetic and alluring figure is because Harris (and the screenwriters) played his broad-stroked vagaries against well-defined flesh-and-blood characters that readers and viewers became invested in; this gave Hannibal a tether around which his many interesting traits and tics could coalesce. Hannibal might be the more interesting and intriguing creation, but both Clarice Starling and Will Graham are the ones what brung you to the dance, and they’re the reason Hannibal’s such a dish. Also, it’s worth nothing that in terms of possessing foibles or interesting quirks, they’re not exactly chopped liver (with or without fava beans). If anything, it’s their flaws that made Starling and Graham intriguing. As Nevala-Lee notes, Lecter is all but omnipotent and omniscient, which is a fictional shortcoming that’s immediately exposed as soon as he’s given the spotlight.
Part and parcel with Hannibal’s failings as a protagonist come the failings of his world. Both Red Dragon and Silence, even at their most grotesque and violent, are set in a recognizable and identifiable America — city streets, suburban cul-de-sacs, 9-to-5 workdays, bills, family, friends. These stories are (again) grounded in such a way that the aristocratic, “educated” world that Lecter calls his own creates an enjoyable friction; when Graham and Starling clash with Lecter, it’s a meeting of their paradigms as well as their minds. (In Silence, there’s also the added bonus of Starling’s own internal struggle between her rural country-girl upbringing and her entry into the world of the FBI.) Any references to Lecter’s lifestyle, or even his handiwork, are treated as subtle accent flavors that complement the entire dish.
In the hands of the otherwise capable Ridley Scott, however, there’s no room for subtlety. If the previous Lecter stories were scrappy underdogs with something to prove, then Hannibal is the reigning champion, now fat and self-satisfied, taking future success for granted. The film wallows in the decadent refinement of Lecter’s world, and not just in his preferences for skin cream and stationary. As we see throughout the film (both in real-time and in flashbacks), a free-range Hannibal Lecter is a Lecter prone to indulge in all his worst excesses. (Not coincidentally, the same can be said for Anthony Hopkins as an actor; through most of the movie, he feasts on the scenery like he’s a recently-released POW set loose upon a Hometown Buffet.) Lecter toys with his prey like a book-smart Snidely Whiplash, either by mocking their storied (and infamous) lineage or by giving them a piece of their own mind sauteed with shallots. While these displays of savoir faire are on some level admirable (and they’re gorgeously filmed by Scott and cinematographer John Matheison), they’re also irrefutably pretentious. Call me rockist if you want, but when a captive Lecter, working under the gun, manages to turn a security guard into a William Blake painting come to life while skinning the face of other one, color me impressed.
What makes that sequence in Jonathan Demme’s film even more effective is that the actual acts of savagery are done off-camera. Sure, we see Lecter gleefully sink his teeth into a guard’s cheek and put down the other with a police baton, and we see (shadowy hints of) the aftermath, but viewers are left to piece together the chain of events by themselves, if they so choose. Scott, unfortunately (who once used these sordid powers of suggestion so well in Alien) leaves nothing to the imagination. We see Lecter cut a guy’s stomach open, and we watch as his insides hit the wet cobblestone and dangle from his corpse. We watch Lecter pops the top of his dinner guest, cut open the brain sac and slice a little sweetbread off the top. And, of course, we watch this delectable morsel go from brain pan to frying pan to Ray Liotta’s mouth.
Even the non-Lecter portions of the film aren’t left to chance. Mason Verger can’t just be a victim of Lecter’s; he has to be a convicted pederast that Lecter drugged and coerced into feeding pieces of his face to his dogs who now looks like a malformed fetus. The women-in-a-man’s-world aspect of Starling’s life and career, handled so deftly by Demme in Silence, are almost played for laughs in Scott’s hands: crude over-the-top barefoot-and-pregnant comments by Liotta’s Paul Krendler (presumably where David Mamet earned his screenwriting money) both pre- and post-appetizer, cruder doodles by idle Italian policemen (and even Lecter), and one particular POV shot that follows Krendler’s gaze as it luridly crawls up the length of Julianne Moore’s legs. Slow-motion shots of particular acts of violence — gunshot wounds, knife attacks, man-eating-pig assaults — both linger at the acts on display and make them nigh-incomprehensible.
The problematic casting of Julianne Moore also fits under this heading. Moore’s a fine actress, and she definitely gives it a go, but in contrast to the demure strength and beauty that Jodie Foster brought to the role, Moore is a complete mismatch for this character. Foster’s Starling was never not attractive, and never not a woman, but her place in her world always weighed on her; she carried herself as a woman that wanted to suppress who (and what) she was expected to be. Even accounting for the time lapsed between the end of Silence and where Hannibal picks up, the contrast between the two versions of the character is unavoidably sharp. Even at her most unbecoming, Moore’s Starling looks (and carries herself) like she’s one moist towelette away from being ready for another Revlon commercial shoot, all style and no substance. That the film ends with her slinking (or, to be more accurate, stumbling) around in an evening gown seems to be there solely to play up the incongruity between actress and character. The plot doesn’t help much, either; where Silence worked hard to make it seem plausible that Starling (and friends) could stand toe-to-toe with a super-genius like Lecter, Hannibal has Starling mostly at the mercy of either Lecter or the FBI, helpless to do anything except react to what’s happening around her. The decision to feature bits of dialogue from Silence (in the form of tapes from Dr. Chilton) with Moore reading Foster’s lines only goes to further highlight where the choices made with the Clarice Starling in Hannibal went off the rails.
And, of course, there’s the game attempt to turn Lecter into an honest-to-goodness anti-hero. If Lecter were a Marvel Comics character from the 1980s, there’d no doubt be a slew of failed attempts to launch a monthly series depicting the good doctor as a proto-Dexter Morgan, avenging the rights of the wronged (and pleasing his refined palette) in his own indomitable way. There were hints of this “redemption” in Silence, what with the film ending with him on the trail of his captor, the loathsome Dr. Chilton. Even the deaths of the security guards could be written off by pro-Lecterites as justified, given he was merely trying to escape his cruel fate. Of course, his cruel fate came as the result of his ghastly crimes against his patients, but there’s no need to let facts get in the way of a good cause.
That’s certainly how Hannibal sees things. Lecter’s not killing innocent people, he’s dispatching all sorts of sinners to save himself from Verger’s dastardly plans (involving the aforementioned man-eating-pigs). Don’t forget he also avenges Starling’s wounded womanhood (through the joy of cooking), and frees himself from her dastardly handcuffed clutches by sacrificing his own hand. Not before stealing a kiss from the fair maiden’s lips, of course. Previously, his flare-ups of dashing charisma were meted out sparingly, as hints of the face he presented to polite society. Here, where not a moment goes by without Hannibal offering the perfect bon mot or slying winking at his predicaments, the charm wears quite thin. It’s too appropriate that the film concludes with a smug one-two punch: a one-handed Lecter, on a plane, corrupting a young boy with some sweet bread, and an obnoxiously winsome “ta-ta” from Lecter (from a letter-reading narration earlier in the film) after the final credits have rolled.
There’s a shot, after the man-eating pig debacle (and bless the filmmaker that can make that sort of contrivance work) (shout-out to David Milch), of Lecter in silhouette, kicking open the doors of the barn, carrying Starling in his arms to “safety.” It’s undoubtedly meant to recall the image of a more famous misunderstood monster, the Universal Studios version of Frankenstein. But Frankenstein’s monster, by its very nature, is sympathetic; it’s a creature that didn’t ask to be born, created by a megalomaniac unconcerned with its well-being, lost in a world that it doesn’t understand. That (from what I’ve read) Hannibal Rising tries to further the efforts of this book / film and paint Lecter in a similar light isn’t just laughable; it’s an outright betrayal of what made the character (and his fictional world) worth a damn in the first place.
