by Brendan Foley
Not too long ago, I caved to Internet pressure and sat down to watch NBC’s low-rated, cultishly adored Hannibal, having been told over and over again that it was amazing, one of the best shows on television, an unparalleled visual experience. So I watched it and discovered that NBC’s Bryan Fuller’s Thomas Harris’s Hannibal is amazing, one of the best shows on television, and an unparalleled visual experience.
Falling in love, hard, with the show made me want to go back and dig through the previous onscreen incarnations of the good Dr. Hannibal the Cannibal. Some of these films I had seen before, some I had not. In this two-part walkthrough, we’ll go through each one of the five films, and at the end we’ll break down the current(ly cancelled) Hannibal TV show.
Okey dokey, here we go:
Case #1: Manhunter
The Lecter: Brian Cox
The Obsessed Cop: Will Graham, as played by William Peterson
The Big Bad: Francis Dolarhyde aka The Tooth Fairy, as played by Tom Noonan
Most Haunting Image: Joan Allen, bathed in heavenly violet glow of a porch light. A romantic vision that betrays murderous intentions.
The Breakdown: It’s weirdly perfect that Brian Cox’s Hannibal is referred to as Dr. Lektor, instead of Lecter. No reason has ever been given for why the spelling of the name was changed, but it ends up being emblematic of the way in which Manhunter is rooted in the Hannibal Lecter mythos, but not truly of it, in the way that each subsequent film and adaptation will be.
Producer Dino De Laurentiis would criticize the film later, saying that “It wasn’t Red Dragon.” But that, like the Lecter/Lektor disparity, speaks to the attributes which allow Manhunter to be wildly successful on its own merits. Other directors and producers would make Hannibal Lecter movies. Michael Mann made a Michael Mann movie that happened to have Hannibal Lecter in it.
So you have a grim, obsessed professional in nice suits, you have the exacting depiction of procedural steps, you have dark silhouettes against glorious sunsets, synth music stings, stylized-but-gripping shootouts, the Mann-ly works. And whereas other Michael Mann films can see him so hellbent on the style that the substance suffers, Manhunter is just a rock solid piece of detective fiction, well-structured and paced.
Mann’s cold, macho atmospherics have the effect of removing all personality and characters from any characters who are not, let us say, murder-prone. Lecter-verse lovers will recognize the names of folks like Jack Crawford, Frederick Chilton, Dr. Bloom, but there’s no hint of personality to any of these men beyond what their functions are to the main narrative.
Mann also took steps to downplay the ludicrous pulp of Harris’s tome, going so far as to remove Dolarhyde’s Red Dragon tattoo and deleting references to Hannibal’s, ahem, appetites. Noonan and Cox both get to play their roles bigger than their cast mates, but compared to the “Turn it up to 11” performances coming down the pike, both men might as well be sleep-walking.
It’s easy to see why Manhunter didn’t lodge in the public consciousness the way the next Lecter films would, or kick off a series. But that should not detract from its qualities as a film. Manhunter is a slick, smart detective thriller with some nice splashes of out-and-out horror thrown in for good measure (Dolarhyde’s confrontation with Freddy Lounds is the stuff of nightmares, made all the more surreal by the film’s otherwise staid exterior).
That’s the double edged sword of hiring an auteur. They’ll give you something great, hopefully, but it will be singularly great (this is the reason I’ve always been secretly grateful that Terry Gilliam didn’t make Harry Potter. He would’ve made a great Terry Gilliam film, but God knows what anyone following him would’ve had to work with). Michael Mann, more than any of the investigators or psychologists or census takers, did the impossible and bent Hannibal Lecter to his will. Such a victory has not been repeated since.
Case #2: The Silence of the Lambs
The Lecter: Anthony Hopkins
The Obsessed Investigator: Clarice Starling, as played by Jodie Foster
The Big Bad: James Gumb aka Buffalo Bill, as played by Ted Levine
Most Haunting Image: Hannibal Lecter’s reflection overlaying Clarice, a ghost that will never be escaped.
The Breakdown: Watching the films so close together gives the viewer a chance to observe where Michael Mann and Ted Demme diverged (the narrow wood notwithstanding) in how they approached similar material. Mann’s approach bombed at the box office and is now a little-remarked upon curiosity. Lambs, by contrast, was a critical smash, a box office phenomenon, an Oscar juggernaut, and has long since become a cultural touchstone familiar even to people who have never seen the film itself.
The first and most striking difference is Demme’s push to externalize the internal world of Clarice Starling. Manhunter is a defiantly cold film, the way that many of Mann’s films retain rigid distance from their subjects. We are always outside of Will Graham’s head, and the impact of his exposures to Dolarhyde and “Lektor” register as cracks across the surface of ice.
Clarice Starling (and Jodie Foster’s performance) is far more open and vulnerable, right from the word jump. Demme leans heavily on POV shots, repeatedly forcing the audience to see the world precisely through Starling’s eyes. When her confrontations with Lecter awaken the buried past, there is never a visual signifier that we have slipped from reality to memory, creating the same feeling of disorientation and unease in the audience that Clarice herself must be feeling.
Having a protagonist who is more obviously weaker and damaged does not make Silence of the Lambs a better film than Manhunter, but you could argue that it is a much more involving one. Will Graham was a cool customer, and the intense reserve with which William Peterson played the character made him seem all the more alien (this was, of course, almost certainly intentional). Clarice Starling is achingly human, and Foster’s mix of youthful innocence and iron will make her both a tremendously effective audience surrogate and a well-defined hero. If you were to make Silence of the Lambs today, I’m sure you’d have to have Clarice beating the shit out of people during training or snarling commands, because ‘feminism’ in modern Hollywood means that the women are butcher than the men (until they need rescuing or go gooey over boys). But Demme and Foster understood that Starling is a great hero because of her weaknesses and failings, not despite, and she’s a great hero for the audience to latch onto in the world gone mad.
And whereas Manhunter treats Hannibal as a supporting character, there to advance the plot and provide some backstory, Lambs turns heavily into the notion of Hannibal the Cannibal as an iconic force. The early scenes are devoted entirely to building up the mythos surrounding Hannibal, and from the moment the camera pans into his cell to find Hopkins staring down the barrel of the lens, there is nothing human about this character anymore. Hannibal Lecter here is a detached, almost whimsical god, inducing madness and mayhem wherever he sets his sights out of malignant fascination. Hopkins may appear in less than 20 minutes of the film, but the entire endeavor is geared around the force of Dr. Lecter, from first minute to last.
That leaves a hole where Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill should register, but (despite that dance and his idiosyncratic speech patterns) Bill never really lands as a full character the way Noonan’s Tooth Fairy did. Bill is a blank (a very scary and somewhat nuanced blank, sure) there to provide the battleground against which Lecter and Starling will combat. The same goes for Bill’s victim, a character that Demme and Ted Tally’s script allege Clarice has a personal empathetic connection to, but who vanishes from the film once she is rescued from the pit.
(Manhunter weirdly dropped this ball, too. In that film the empathetic connection was between Will and Dolarhyde, but then when they finally came face to face Will just shot him like 50 times.)
Demme seems much more at ease with the Gothic and fantastical side of this universe than Mann, which also might play into why audiences accepted his vision more readily. Because everything is amped up to just this side of arch, it allows the audience to more easily enjoy the carnage and chaos that trails Lecter. Silence of the Lambs may not be definitively better than Manhunter, but it’s a whole lot more fun.
Case #3: Hannibal
The Lecter: Anthony Hopkins
The Obsessed Investigator: Clarice Starling, as played by Julianne Moore
The Big Bad: Mason Verger aka “OH SHIT WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO THAT GUY’S FACE?”, as played by Gary Oldman
Most Haunting Image: The tiniest smear of red peeking from beneath Ray Liotta’s hat.
The Breakdown: When telling the story of Hannibal Lecter, you are faced with straddling the balance between the refined and the lurid, between the internal and the external, between the polished and the savage. Mann rejected almost all of pulp lunacy of the source, while Demme embraced it a bit more, but still kept the crazy in its own separate corner of the film.
Leave it to Ridley Scott, then, to make the first Hannibal Lecter film to rip off the parking brake and go screaming down into the pit of madness and extravagant insanity. Hannibal is a haunted funhouse ride as designed by a psychotic art director, and it’s exactly one cackling Vincent Price and moaning Peter Lorre away from being the kind of gleeful macabre party that folks like Roger Corman or Jacques Tourneur traded in.
The plot of Hannibal finds the good doctor living on the run in Europe, having assumed the identity of a ‘disappeared’ library curator. Back in the states, insane pedophile billionaire Mason Verger, a former patient who escaped Dr. Lecter’s care with his life (but not his face) has been plotting his revenge. After Clarice Starling is scapegoated for an FBI raid gone wrong, Lecter begins reaching out to taunt/flirt with her, and Verger pulls strings to have Starling reassigned to the Lecter case. There’s also a money-hungry inspector (James Bond’s buddy, Giancarlo Giannini) and a sexist boob of a FBI director (Liotta) hanging around the edges of the story, waiting to be so much gristle beneath the churning wheels of dueling supervillains Lecter and Verger.
The things which remain good about Hannibal are almost entirely aesthetic ones. Shot by John Mathieson and scored by Hans Zimmer, Hannibal is awash in bold, baroque colors. The Italian locales are all suitably darkened and haunted, the mist-shrouded mansion where Verger dwells, even more so. The heightened atmospherics serve the story well, as the bigBigBIG performances of scene-chewing Hopkins and faceless Oldman (it seems these two are only overlapping when directors need an overload of crazy) would not work at all if the film was trying to play it as straight. As is, Hopkins and Oldman clearly delight in seeing how far they can push their respective monsters, and it is tremendous fun.
Unfortunately, that fun does not extend to Clarice Starling our ostensible lead. Jodie Foster was reportedly so repulsed by the book (which SPOILER climaxed with Clarice joining Lecter in a cannibalistic dinner before becoming his lover/travel companion) that she would only come back if rewarded with a ludicrous salary. Wanting to keep the ludicrousness on the screen, they turned her down and hired Julianne Moore.
Now, let’s be clear about this upfront: Julianne Moore is one of our best living actors, of either gender, full stop (so long as you’re not asking her to do a Boston accent). But she is stranded by a script that first strips away all Starling’s vulnerability and nuance to make her a flinty Sarah-Connor-in-T2 knockoff, then dumps her in a basement for what feels like over the half the movie to watch while the real action goes down on a different continent. When Starling does finally become an active player in the film, the movie’s practically over and her only real role is to rescue Hannibal and then be rescued by him. The layered, flawed character of Silence, one of the great protagonists of modern horror, is reduced to nothing more than a reactor to whatever Hannibal Lecter is thinking/feeling/doing.
Starling’s uselessness stings all the more because it reflects the general lack of narrative spine of Hannibal. Manhunter and Lambs were happy to diverge from the main narrative, but they were at heart very straightforward procedurals. Hannibal has what feels like three or four central narratives all competing for attention, the kind of structure that might work great in a book that can shuffle through characters and plots for pages on end, but in a film with a more limited runtime, it just makes the whole thing feel wobbly and unfocused.
If the film does have a central spine, it’s the ‘love’ story between Lecter and Clarice. While Scott diverges from the book’s arc (in the book SPOILER they fuck) he still preserves the basic idea of Lecter and Clarice being at least somewhat romantically inclined to the other. The movie tries to create some ambiguity about what exactly Lecter’s feelings are towards Agent Starling, but from the moment Hopkins delivers a monologue about the power of love, the jig is up. Lecter desperately wants to jump Clarice’s bones, and she’s at least somewhat conflicted about her own desires towards her prey.
Maybe another a director could have made this material sing (in fact, I know a different director could have. Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal TV show is running laps around this film while telling much the same story. But we’ll get there) but Scott is simply too surface-level a director to make it work. He can surround his characters with myriad layers of set dressing and art design, but he can’t chart the insides of their minds. Moore can lay on the pathos all she can, she’s still stuck with a director who cares less about her performance than about getting the color-timing just right on entrails splattering on the cobblestones.
As a fan of splattering entrails (and of cobblestones. It’s a fetish, don’t judge) I enjoyed the silly and playful elements of the film. But the romance between Hannibal and Clarice never clicks, and neither does the movie’s attempts to recast Lecter as an antihero who “eats the rude.” (The perfectly polite police officers that Lecter brutalized and mutilated in his escape notwithstanding.) Hannibal is now a cartoon figure, and Hannibal is the tunnel to Toon Town.
Hannibal represents a turning point for the Dr. Lecter mythos. This is the point where Lecter stopped being a character and became an icon. Good for the brand, bad for the films.
How bad? We’ll check it out in our second part, where time folds in on itself and brings us back to the story of the Red Dragon, and to two separate Hannibal Lecter origin stories. See you then.