"Hannibal"

Both repugnant and boring, the grisly, disgusting new Hannibal Lecter thriller is likely the worst film of this year -- and quite possibly the next. Where to dig in first?

By Charles Taylor

Feb 9, 2001 | It's hard to argue with the readers who find the novelist Thomas Harris' necro-thrillers so compelling. Pick up his 1988 "The Silence of the Lambs" or even the mostly atrocious "Hannibal" (1999) and you'll find a shrewd hack's talent for keeping you turning the pages. But for all their readability his books are no fun. You'd think that any writer who invents a character like Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant and erudite psychiatrist who also happens to be a mass-murdering cannibal, would be willing to admit that he's out to administer cheesy, ghoulish shocks.

But Harris considers himself above the wit and low cunning necessary for that sort of thing. Instead, Harris uses the prevailing morbidity of his books to signal that deep things are going on underneath the sordid plot. He's like a man trying to dream up a splatter movie in a fugue state. Harris conceives the grisliest imaginable scenes (an escape sequence where Hannibal Lecter rips off a policeman's face and then uses it to disguise himself as the dead man; Lecter taking off the top of a man's skull and frying up the fellow's brains while he's still conscious) and then presents them as if they were serious examinations of the nature of evil. The effect is both invasive and distanced -- as if you were being smeared with viscera by someone wearing surgical gloves.

But damned if there aren't plenty of readers and critics -- smart people who ought to know better -- who buy into Harris' seriousness. Maybe it's easier to think that Harris is plumbing our collective dark sides, or some such twaddle, than to admit to being drawn in by his po-faced Grand Guignol. Or maybe the cultural allusions that accompany the atrocities in his books, references to Dante and Glenn Gould's recording of "The Goldberg Variations" (a favorite of Lecter's -- nobody's all bad) seem like evidence that Harris is a man of refinement instead of a sideshow barker.

Through Harris' novels (including "Red Dragon," the first in which Lecter appears) and through Anthony Hopkins' performance in the film of "Silence of the Lambs," Hannibal Lecter has become the most famous monster in contemporary pop culture. In Ridley Scott's new film of Harris' "Hannibal," to which it is mostly faithful, Lecter has moved from the sidelines to center stage. (Hopkins was only in "The Silence of the Lambs" for 30 minutes; he won a best actor Academy Award for the performance.) The delight that "Silence of the Lambs" audiences showed for Lecter is no longer a naughty little pleasure but the new film's raison d'être.

Scott's "Hannibal" is the apotheosis of serial-killer chic, the prestige movie version of a Manson T-shirt. No longer a villain, Lecter is now the hero, the superior being given the power of judgment over all the other characters -- the serial killer as arbiter of taste. Even as guardian angel. On NBC's "Today" show recently Sir Tony claimed that Lecter only kills the people who are out to harm Clarice. That's wrong, but it's true that Scott and his screenwriters David Mamet (who worked only on the first draft) and Steven Zaillian have arranged the movie so that we see Lecter's victims exactly as he does. Putting audiences on the side of the villain by making the victims repulsive is a trick that Kubrick employed in "A Clockwork Orange." And here, no one whom Lecter kills is shown the slightest glint of sympathy. His victims are all thieves or killers or pedophiles, or cops so motivated by greed that they're presented as indistinguishable from the bad guys.

There is still one exemplar of morality unclouded by corruption: Clarice Starling, the novice FBI agent who so fascinated Lecter in "Silence" (and played here by Julianne Moore taking over from Jodie Foster). But now, 10 years into her job with the bureau, she's no longer its pride but a thorn in the way of moral expediency. Trying to do good in this world, as Clarice does, only makes you a dupe for the sleazy and powerful. So why bother? Lecter, says Clarice, eats people "to show his contempt for those who exasperate him." In "Hannibal," Lecter is lucky enough to find a director who, like him, looks at humanity and sees a banquet of corruption. Goody, goody. Where to dig in first?

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