Hannibal
dir. Ridley Scott
MGM

The universal adoration of The Silence of the Lambs is mysterious. It's a fairly good movie clearly strained by attempts to mix novelist Thomas Harris' gruesome morbidity (or is it morbid gruesomeness?) with the girl-power themes stressed by director Jonathan Demme and star Jodie Foster. But it's not better or deeper or richer than any number of its peers; it's just more legitimate-seeming, a proper way to get your psycho-killer jollies.

What deadens the film, in fact, is that the spit-and-polish its legitimacy requires resulted in an undercooked movie. To wit: Silence is sly in how it canonizes Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), the murderous psychiatrist against whom FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) must match wits to gain the former's insight into the serial killings the latter is investigating. The hook intended for the movie is the relationship the two develop: how he sees her as being less spoiled than her peers ("The world is more interesting with you in it") and how she attempts to keep a fully professional shell around her while he scours it for chinks.

For the effect, Demme, Hopkins and screenwriter Ted Tally make Lecter as seductive as possible. Sure, he has his bad, serial-killer side, but his only onscreen crime is killing while escaping from captors, and with Hopkins' sympathetic portrayal, you root for him to escape a sadist like Frederic Chilton (Anthony Heald), the doctor doing his damnedest to psychoanalyze Lecter. Chilton's condescension and incivility are counterpointed by Lecter's impeccable bearing; similarly, it's Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) who's portrayed killing innocent people for psychopathic reasons. Lecter just wants to get away, and we always cheer for our heroes to escape — or, put another way, if we're cheering for a character to escape, doesn't that mean he's the hero? The answer is always yes, within the world of the fiction — he's at least a hero in relation to the other characters.

Of course, he's also a cannibal. But Demme and Tally weren't interested in playing with this dichotomy and making an issue of our propensity to embrace evil; it's Starling's straightforward quest to stop Buffalo Bill that really drives The Silence of the Lambs, with Hopkins as showy support. The filmmakers should have been interested in playing with it, however, instead of simply shirking it. It would have resulted in a much more meaningful exploration of the heart of evil than the somewhat mechanical thrills Silence offers up. (Ooh, anagrams!)

The only reason to say so much about The Silence of the Lambs when the topic is Hannibal is that the sequel is most noteworthy in the way it's forced to explore what its predecessor avoided. Hannibal can't sidestep the issue of complicity whatsoever — here, it's Starling (now Julianne Moore) who's given the supporting role. With our attentions and affections intended so clearly for the title character, the matter of how we are to comprehend him is paramount. But, again, rather than sink their teeth into the material to produce something revelatory about human nature, Hannibal director Ridley Scott and screenwriters David Mamet and Steven Zaillian simply take the same notes played by Silence and hammer on them, inventing characters that make Chilton and Buffalo Bill seem chummy:

• Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), a ridiculously wealthy child molester whom Lecter enticed to self-disfigurement and whose thirst for feed-him-to-pigs revenge is hidden not at all by one of the most outrageous fright masks in the history of film makeup;

• Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), an Italian detective willing to sacrifice others' lives for his shot at the considerable ransom Verger is offering for Lecter;

• Evelda Drumgo (Hazelle Goodman), a crystal meth manufacturer/dealer who's so debased she gets into a gunfight with police while carrying her baby strapped to her chest; and

• Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), a cocksure alpha male from the FBI's legal division who's trying to put the proper spin on Starling's killing of Drumgo while also trying to bully his way into Starling's pants.

Of course, if that was truly all there was to Lecter, he'd be interchangeable with any host of summer-movie beauhunks. But the audience is there to feel his whole icky weight, and so the filmmakers are happy to trot out his standard backstory — like when Starling qualifies her statement that Lecter tries to only kill the rude by mentioning that includes a flautist he felt was spoiling an otherwise good orchestra.

How can we be expected to take this seriously? Lecter, particularly drawn this way, is a comic character — Felix Unger with homicidal tendencies. Hopkins clearly agrees with this idea; he invests his character with so much gentle venom that he's colossally funny despite his penchant for disemboweling his enemies — he's as alluring as evil has ever been onscreen.

But he's smothered by a cast and crew who take the movie deadly seriously (well, except Oldman); what we have here is the makings of a perfectly good satire, and I can't think of a less satirically-minded director than Ridley Scott. (Can you have a sense of humor and direct Gladiator like he directed Gladiator?) Keeping pace with him, Moore is as dour as ever, but that doesn't mean she's not quite good, and her scenes with Hopkins have more than the requisite chemistry. But in the same way that Gladiator didn't capitalize on any of its themes, Hannibal is just a series of Grand Guignol set pieces played for little more than their face value and strung through with gore.

It should be stated that the problem with Hannibal is not the gore — as far out as the movie's climax goes, it's no more graphic and even less unsettling than Julie Taymor's riveting Titus (also starring Hopkins), which has the moral get-out-of-jail-free card of being a Shakespeare adaptation. The problem with Hannibal is how disconnected the gore is from any meaning, how poorly it's thought out — the film's last-act dispatching of Ray Liotta makes your skin crawl, but it has no more weight to it than the death-on-the-toilet scene from Jurassic Park. They're both literally nothing but bad lawyer jokes.

This dum-dum mentality defines Hannibal no matter how hard they try to break from it in certain scenes. Lecter is given to long dissertations about society — but only to say that it's bad, and all the movie offers up as proof is its askew cast of characters.

At the same time, in its last minutes, Hannibal does something to show just how strongly Lecter regards Starling, and I was taken aback by how moving the moment was — more than at any other point in either Hopkins/Lecter film, we're given a palpable sense of his love for Starling. That's the only one of the movie's concurrent plot threads that's meaningful in any way, and even it's only for a moment. Regardless, the scene is remarkably fresh and, being a departure from Harris' novel, shows what the filmmakers could come up with when pushed. It's a shame they didn't push themselves harder. One scene's worth of inventive spirit can't save an otherwise mindless movie.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)