Retrospective:
Silence of the Lambs perhaps benefits the most from stellar performances by Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. The superbly crafted suspense thriller that director Jonathan Demme has made from Thomas Harris's taut best-selling novel The Silence of the Lambs slams you like a sudden blast of bone-chilling, pulse-pounding terror. Clarice Starling, played with heartfelt tenacity by Jodie Foster, is an FBI trainee on the trail of a serial killer. Her search ends in the suburban home of dressmaker Jame Gumb (Ted Levine). It is Gumb's cellar workshop (the place where he shoots and skins his tall, fleshy female victims) that Demme transforms into a harrowing vision of hell.
The confrontation scenes between Lecter and Starling are the heart of the picture, and Hopkins and Foster - who is flawless in a performance - play off each other with enormous skill. They are subjects to long, searching close-ups. With lesser actors, such scrutiny could wreck the film by exposing theatricality and cant. But Foster and Hopkins don't make a false move. Starling knows Lecter is testing her, trying to wear down her self-confidence.
Hannibal Lector: "A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."
Demme and Ted Tally, the playwright (Terra Nova) turned screenwriter (White Palace), have set out to turn the exploitation genre on its empty head and fill it with ideas and purpose. There's none of the all-in-fun disfigurement and dismemberment that you get in the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th gorefests. The brutality in Silence leaves you shaken because it's meant to seem painful instead of playful, terrifying instead of titillating. Foster's Clarice Starling and Smith's Catherine Martin represent something unique in slasher movies: women who won't play victim. Gruesome subject mater such as women being kidnapped, starved, left for dead then skinned alive is what courses through Silence's context.
But, taken out of context, these scenes could provoke protest from such forums as the National Organization for Women, whose L.A. chapter recently threatened a boycott of the publisher of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho because of the novel's graphic depictions of women being tortured. Few could question the rise in crimes against women or the rise of misogyny in movies. In the Hollywood of the Nineties, the next best thing to making a movie about Jack the Ripper is hiring someone like him to write or direct. But Silence of the Lambs does not merit censoring (free expression is still a constitutional right) or even censuring.
Starling is assigned to do a behavioral profile on Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a former psychiatrist imprisoned in a Baltimore asylum for carving up nine people and cooking his favorite bits. Dr. Lecter, known as Hannibal the Cannibal, prides himself on having once eaten the liver of a census taker with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. A brilliant stage actor (Equus, Antony and Cleopatra), Hopkins can sometimes be too much on film - check out his shameless hamboning in Audrey Rose. But this time he calibrates every nuance for maximum effect. Lecter was figured in an earlier Thomas Harris novel, Red Dragon, filmed as Manhunter in 1986 with Brian Cox as the mad doctor. As chilling as Cox was, his role was merely a cameo. Hopkins goes deeper. The polished, elegant evil of his Lecter surpasses anything he's ever done on the screen. He's a fiend for the ages.
Hannibal Lecter: Why do you think he removes their skins, Agent Starling?
Hannibal Lecter: Enthrall me with your acumen.
Clarice Starling: It excites him. Most serial killers keep some sort of trophies from their victims.
Hannibal Lecter: I didn't.
Clarice Starling: No. No, you ate yours.
Ted Levine is truly scary.You believe that he is truly twisted and perverse. Buffalo Bill is the combination of three real life serial killers: Ed Gein, who skinned his victims; Gary Heidnick, who kept women he kidnapped in a pit in his basement; and Ted Bundy, who used the cast on his hand as bait to lour unsuspecting women into his van. Gein, whom other recognizable horror icons Leatherface and Norman Bates from Psycho are also loosely based, was only positively linked to two murders and suspected of two hers. He gathered most of his materials not through murder, but grave-robbing. In the popular imagination, however, he remains a serial killer with uncounted victims.
Attention to this kind of detail is a Demme trademark. At his peak (Citizens Band, Melvin and Howard, Something Wild), Demme can intermingle comedy and drama because he builds on a solid foundation of character. Silence is a powerhouse that shows Demme at his best and boldest. Even the tacky flashbacks and a sequence lifted from Wait Until Dark can't blunt the film's wallop. Demme celebrates his female warriors. You can feel his pride in Starling for rallying against her male demons. For all the unbridled savagery on display, what is shrewd, significant and finally hopeful about Silence of the Lambs is the way it proves that a movie can be mercilessly scary and mercifully humane at the same time.
Hannibal Lector: "I do wish we could chat longer, but... I'm having an old friend for dinner. Bye"
Hannibal 'the Cannibal' Lector
reference: http://heroicbrutality.blogspot.com/
another comments:
- If you disregard the homophobic elements, you'll enjoy Demme's terrific thriller with brilliant acting from Hopkins, who makes a likable hero out of Hannibal, and Jodie Foster, as the alert agent who becomes his reluctant partner and romantic interest
- Understandably, much has been made of Hopkins' hypnotic Lecter, but the laurels must go to Levine's killer, admirably devoid of camp overstatement, and to Foster, who evokes a vulnerable but pragmatic intelligence.
- ...the rare scary movie that allows its actors room to circle and brush lightly against on another, generating cool sparks.
- The Academy also rightly awarded Best Actress to Foster for being the heart and soul of the piece.
- An accomplished, effective, grisly, and exceptionally sick slasher film that I can't with any conscience recommend, because the purposes to which it places its considerable ingenuity are ultimately rather foul.
- The over-the-top story reeks of phoniness, grisly violence and exploitation.
6:28PM TH
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