by Brendan Foley
And we’re back! Time to dig into the most recent of cinematic output featuring Hannibal the Cannibal. As we’ll quickly assess, the back-stretch of this film franchise isn’t fit to lick the human-entrail soaked shoes of the earlier films. Fortunately, a certain NBC show came along to restore some of the mystique to the good doctor.
So, pour yourself a nice chianti and prepare a warm meal. Let’s dig in.
Case #4: Red Dragon
The Lecter: Hopkins, one last time
The Obsessed Investigator: Will Graham, as played by Edward Norton
The Big Bad: Francis Dolarhyde, as played by Ralph Fiennes
Most Haunting Image: Lecter on a leash, evil chained but unbroken.
The Breakdown: Brett Ratner has one brilliant move with Red Dragon, and he makes it before the opening title comes on screen. The first ten minutes of the film play as the conclusion to a completely different Hannibal Lecter film, as we see the good doctor thriving as a secret cannibal/high society fellow before his pupil/friend Will Graham stumbles over his cookbook. There’s great energy between Hopkins and Norton in this scene, Graham the bright-eyed and excitable student, Lecter the taciturn but affectionate master. When the exchange goes bloody, it’s well-paced and well-executed (natch), and audiences might find themselves settling in for a new take on the Red Dragon.
And immediately thereafter, the film runs out of ideas.
It’s not that Red Dragon is an incompetent film. It’s not. I found it to be a fairly bad film, but the craft of it is…fine. But while ‘fine’ is, you know, mostly an acceptable thing to be, mostly, when you are coming on the heels of two masterpieces and a bugfuck gonzo ‘Did I Just See What They Just Showed Me?’ roller coaster, being ‘fine’ seems a fair sight short.
I’d say Red Dragon plays like the network TV version of Hannibal the Cannibal, except there actually is a network TV version of Hannibal the Cannibal and this ain’t that.
What Ratner and screenwriter Ted Tally have done in remaking (or re-adapting, if you want to be charitable) Red Dragon to fit into the overarching Hopkins-Lecter oeuvre feels less like embracing the returned prodigal son, and more like bringing the problem dog to heel, stripping away everything interesting and idiosyncratic about the Michael Mann film.
Every element here is less thought through and less interesting than in any of the prior Lecter films, even as Ratner goes out of his way to steal entire shots from Jonathan Demme and Michael Mann.
Like, OK, in Manhunter, Dolarhyde lived in a regular house. It was a little out of the way, but there was nothing about the exterior or interior that suggested that the house housed a dangerous lunatic. Not only did this make Dolarhyde feel all the more dangerous, it also made him feel more plausible, more human. His insanity didn’t announce itself, but was instead this coiled and unshakeable thing that festered within him until the moments when it could be unleashed (like when he confronted Freddy Lounds while wearing the stocking on his face).
In Red Dragon, Dolarhyde lives in what can only be described as a decrepit murder-palace. William Castle would look at this place and say, ‘You’re laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?’. This isn’t horror, this is Edward Fucking Scissorhands, complete with Danny Elfman leaning hard on his usual ‘spooky’ themes. Dolarhyde’s behavior has little consistency except to announce to the audience “THIS IS SCARY RIGHT NOW, BE AFRAID RIGHT NOW” in giant neon letters, which, having those running all the time is bad for the environment; Ratner, maybe think these things through next time.
That ‘It’s the same but lesser’ thing extends to the cast. Everyone is fine. Just…fine.
Edward Norton is fine as Will Graham, but he can’t pull off haunted the way William Peterson could, and nor is he as believable as a man’s man (also, Norton didn’t go the extra mile and have his real name line up with the fictional character’s name, so clearly his effort leaves something to be desired). And also, because Ratner, like Ridley Scott, has no idea how to dramatize the inner life of his characters, we never see the way that the investigation rips at Will. The whole idea that Graham is special because of his imagination and ability to emphasize is mentioned, but fades away after one early scene, so Will is basically just a clichéd troubled cop.
Harvey Keitel is fine as Jack Crawford, but he doesn’t have either Dennis Farina’s duplicitous, possibly untrustworthy edge, and neither does he have Scott Glenn’s sense of innate paternal warmth.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is fine as Freddy Lounds, but his take on Lounds as a bored burnout is much less interesting than the ’80s sleazebag played by Stephen Lang, and his big confrontation with Dolarhyde falls pretty flat.
Ralph Fiennes is fine as Dolarhyde, but he’s not as memorably creepy or pathetic as Tom Noonan. He’s not as physically imposing, doesn’t have any really memorable lines or line readings, and the tattoo is pretty lame looking.
And then there’s Hopkins. Anthony Hopkins ruins the movie, not so much for his performance as for his presence. By opening and closing the film with Lecter, and by bloating his screen time during the middle, it warps the entire narrative into a ‘Hannibal Lecter story’ when that is simply not what Red Dragon is. And because Norton/Graham is a much weaker screen partner than Foster/Starling, it makes Hopkins seem even more operatic, and Will Graham even floppier as a lead.
It hurts all the more because there is a kernel of a strong idea at the heart of a Lecter-centric retelling of this story. If the film had really turned hard into the idea that Lecter needs some sort of student/teacher, predator/prey, friend/enemy relationship, and shown how he burns through Will before setting his sights on Starling, that might be a worthy enough idea for a film, especially a prequel. But instead Ratner and screenwriter Tally (returning from Silence of the Lambs) steadfastly continue to color within the lines. They try to both be incredibly faithful to the original story while also crowbarring in Lecter stuff, and the results is a mishmash that never establishes its own voice.
Red Dragon ends with Will Graham crumpling up a note from Lecter and chucking it overboard before returning to his family, no longer giving a shit what Lecter has to say. I doubt it was intended as a meta-moment, but Will Graham easily dismissing Lecter’s salvo is about the best possible commentary on this two-hour shrug of a movie.
Case #5: Hannibal Rising
The Lecter: Gaspard Ulliel
The Obsessed Investigator: Hannibal Lecter, as played by Gaspard Ulliel
The Big Bad: Vladis Grutas, as played by Rhys Ifans
Most Haunting Image: Gong Li making out with her nephew, who happens to be Hannibal Lecter
The Breakdown: Shockingly, the movie based on a book written under duress, with a screenplay by the same author of said duress-derived book, is a piece of garbage.
Hannibal Lecter’s backstory had been teased and referenced in the earlier Thomas Harris books (references and teases that the movies largely ignored), but the decision to actually sit down and tell the origin of Hannibal the Cannibal didn’t arise from artistic drive. Rather, Dino De Laurentiis informed Thomas Harris that he, Dino, wanted a Hannibal Lecter prequel to keep the series going, and would happily make the movie without Harris’ input (which is such a dickish thing to do it automatically rescinds whatever cool-guy credit Dino had in store from funding Evil Dead 2). Harris, who normally averages a book a decade (in a good decade, anyway) hastily assembled a novel detailing Hannibal Lecter’s journey from adorable moppet to cold-blooded killer.
Which is a fucking stupid idea, just on the face of it. The terror of Hannibal (of any monster, really) comes from the unknown. It comes from looking at a (seemingly) normal man and being unable to fathom the madness contained beneath the flesh. How someone so refined and so genteel can possess such animalistic savagery. As with most every prequel that doesn’t in some way involve Vince Gilligan, going back to the part of the story before anything interesting happened is not a good idea.
Let’s extend the teensiest bit of courtesy to this movie and acknowledge that there are, visually anyway, some interesting ideas on display. The long opening prologue, involving the two adorable Lecter children and the sudden arrival of World War 2 to shatter the idyll of Lecter Castle (fucking hell) is shot and cut like a riff on Saving Private Ryan, with washed out colors and anonymous corpses lining the ground. When Hannibal and the film travel to France, the color pallet opens up to gorgeous array, and the violence becomes giallo-inspired and heavily personal. Director Peter Webber made this film coming off of Girl with a Pearl Earring, and he and cinematographer Ben Davis craft some truly gorgeous, painterly compositions.
But while Webber has a nice eye, he has no feel for either procedural narrative or horror filmmaking. The movie’s a plodding bore with a wretched narrative structure (Hannibal doesn’t start working on his actual revenge until over an hour into the film, and he barely does any detective work. Once the villains, who have been hiding out undetected for over a decade, find out that someone is out to get them, they cannot throw themselves at him fast enough. They may as well just line up in front of the wood chipper [not that there’s a wood chipper or anything. That’d be too interesting for a movie that seems to find a severed head or a stab wound to be the height of depravity] and Webber has no idea how to stage violence for either suspense or thrills or shock. There’s a scene where Hannibal is using a samurai sword to chop up a butcher in the French countryside (not nearly as entertaining as it sounds) and the way the sequence is cut it’s hard to tell how much damage Hannibal is even inflicting.
If I’m watching a scene where one man is chopping up another man with a samurai sword and I can’t decipher how hurt the man being chopped up is, you have made some grievous mistakes.
Beyond being a bore and a chore and a snore and another thing that rhymes with bore, Hannibal Rising’s greatest sin is the way it fundamentally misunderstands the title character. Not that there’s a consistent character to be found in this wet fart of a motion picture. Hannibal is a mute, practically feral, young man for the first twenty/thirty minutes of the film, and literally the second he becomes capable of stringing words together to form a sentence, Ulliel starts playing scenes at full-Hopkins. He hasn’t been speaking English for more than twenty minutes before he’s delivering psycho-babble at Dominic West’s war crimes cop (West could nominally have been in the ‘Obsessed Investigator’ slot, but his character would have to be at all fucking relevant to merit it). Why? Because ‘playing mind games with a cop’ is what people know Hannibal for, so they better stick it in.
There’s another scene where he finds a Japanese mask that sort of resembles the famous bite-guard mask from Silence, and the music starts pounding and Ulliel starts grinning and he slides the mask on and then it is never seen or referenced in any way against whatsoever because fuck this movie
It was a mistake for Hannibal to move Hannibal Lecter from the wicked trickster at the edge of the story to the focus of the story itself, but this movie doubles-down on that film’s biggest misstep: the recalibration of Hannibal Lecter from monster to antihero. For as much as everyone talks about how evil Hannibal’s actions are in this film, he never does anything all that bad. He kills the war criminals, but they ATE HIS SISTER. Maybe if the film had invested any time in making his victims at all repentant or remorseful, Hannibal’s destruction of them would carry muster. Nope. Ifans, a very good actor most of the time, is stranded playing a villain who as no identifiable traits except how proud he is of how evil he can be.
Hell, they even have Lecter deliver a speech about how he only kills ‘bullies’. What the hell even is this? Does this have anything to do with the guy from Manhunter or Silence of the Lambs, or even Hannibal or the Red Dragon movie? The idea of Hannibal Lecter as some kind of tragic vigilante isn’t just stupid on the face of it, it’s fundamentally dishonest to every previous iteration of this character.
But hey, Dino got his Hannibal Lecter prequel. The book was savaged by pretty much everyone and Harris hasn’t published one since. The movie cost $50 million to make and barely made half that at the domestic box office (it turned a profit internationally, but only just). Bang up job, Dino.
And that, for a while, seemed to be that for the good doctor. The Hopkins movies had puttered out, and the attempt at keeping the property going post-Hopkins fell on its face immediately. Not to mention, there were no more books left to film.
So where oh where could Lecter land next? Someplace silly like broadcast television, probably.
Case #6: Hannibal
The Lecter: Mads Mikkelsen
The Obsessed Investigator: Will Graham, as played by Hugh Dancy
The Big Bad: A variety of killers of the week, but most recently: Francis Dolarhyde aka The Tooth Fairy, as played by Richard Armitage
Most Haunting Image: Hannibal’s Broken Heart
The Breakdown: When it came out that NBC was doing a Hannibal Lecter origin story series, I avoided it like the fucking plague. Not only did this seem like an abominable idea just at first glance, but it was compounded by NBC’s extensive recent history of digging up whatever ’80s/’90s property they could get their hands on and fashioning a crappy show out of it. They tried to convince us to watch The Firm again, you guys. With Josh Lucas. Josh. Lucas.
Even when the reviews started coming in favorably, I still resisted, mostly out of simple exhaustion with the whole super-serial-killer format. I was burnt out on artful tableaus of death, and assumed that whatever Hannibal had to offer was something I had already seen more than enough of.
Brendan Foley is a stupid idiot. I know you already know that, but just wanted to be sure we are on the same page.
At this late date, what else is there to be said about Bryan Fuller and his team’s (which includes directors David Slade and Vincenzo Natali, doing work that puts much of feature horror to shame [including some of their own movies. How you go from a Twilight movie to this…]) achievement? Over three seasons, they have crafted almost forty hours of peerless horror fiction, easily trumping any other horror television program that I could name.
Sick, twisted, often hilarious, and frequently shocking in how moving it can be, Hannibal is an achievement that has to be seen to be believed. How does this show exist? Well, technically it doesn’t since the whole ‘terrible ratings’ thing led to the ‘cancellation’ thing, but for thirty-nine hours and three seasons, it DID exist. On NBC! Somehow!
Mikkelsen makes an entrancing, hypnotic Lecter, never copying Hopkins in mannerism or speech but still evoking the same character. And as frail, fragmented Will Graham, Dancy breathed new life into an overused archetype. The Will seen here is a man under constant psychic attack, and the show never flinches from the devastating costs of a life lived in close proximity to violence. Even as the show is delighting in the artfully staged murder tableaux, it never loses sight of the devastation that such loss creates, or the grisly toll that it exacts from those men and women who court the edges of madness and despair.
No one courts that line more than Hannibal Lecter, and the show gives him back his mystique and his terror. Though technically an ‘origin’ story (though a much more graceful one than the agonizingly linear and uninteresting Rising), Hannibal never allows you to know the true mind of Hannibal. He’s monstrous and yet vulnerable, alien and yet human, evil and yet so convincing and appealing. To be near him is to be struggling against an undertow drawing you into the deep dark, and the show examines what is both captivating and hideous about the idea.
Hannibal is not a perfect show. The knowingly pretentious dialogue and styling can become overbearing, garbling important narrative and dramatic points. And the show can become so laden down with wacky (a season two arc brought in Mason Verger, played by Michael Pitt, with the wacky so cranked up that it overpowered the show. Joe Anderson took over Verger in the third season and his more subdued, mutilated Mason fit in much better) that it becomes dangerously close to tilting over into out-and-out camp lunacy.
But Fuller and his cast and crew always find a way to steer back towards the dark heart of the show and its title character. Grief and loss haunt the edges of the story, anchoring the physics and logic-defying madness to recognizable reality. It’s a dark show, an often hard-to-watch show, but profound understanding of loneliness and the desire for connection provide Hannibal with a bleak but unbroken spine.
Hannibal Lecter fascinates because he is formed of contradictions and irreconcilable qualities. That he can be so suave, so charming, and yet possess unthinkable brutality beneath that veneer. The most successful incarnations create worlds that are a step out of reality, that exist within the fragmented internal landscape where madness and reason war with each over for dominance in the psyche. Lecter appeals to a sort of rational barbarianism, his academic speechifying giving credence to the indulging of the most primal, most appalling of drives.
The reason why Clarice and Will work so well as heroes is that we are convinced of their fragility. Their susceptibility to his ideas mirror our own, and their struggle to break from Lecter’s grip and maintain principles of law, order, and reason embody our own desire to win out over the animal part of our own psyches, to believe that this civilization we have fostered is indeed whole and can indeed protect us.
It’s one of the oldest dilemmas in human discourse, and Hannibal Lecter is the perfect boogeyman to embody it. Even if the recent forays into Lecter stories have not struck the same chord as Silence of the Lambs (and I’d be curious to read what was going on culturally at the time that made that movie hit so profoundly), it is safe to assume that Hannibal Lecter will go on taunting us from behind that sheet of glass for years to come.
The question then is, what is the glass for? Is it to keep Hannibal Lecter locked far away…or is it to make sure we always know where we can find him when we need him?
Read part one of this series here.
