Silence of the Lambs

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins

I’ve never met anybody that said they didn’t like Silence of the Lambs. Everybody has their favorite moments. Whether it’s Sir Anthony Hopkins making that fft-fft-fft sound, or Ted Levine tucking his manhood between his legs and dancing to “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus, there’s something for the whole family.

While the plot isn’t overly ambitious, and could have easily been done on any crime-of-the-week TV show, the direction of the film and the performances by its core cast created a film that transcends the average police procedural. The roles of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter netted Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins each an Academy Award. The film also received Oscars for Best Film, Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I note the awards as proof that a police procedural can not only be engaging, but artistic.

And also terrifying. While many people note the horrifying performance by Anthony Hopkins, I think it’s Ted Levine’s that was true genius. He played the antagonist, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, in such a nuanced way that each scene of his featured a different side of the character. I watched as Levine took us through the unassuming man with a broken arm, the vicious killer, the seemingly stoned man Starling meets at the door, and the tortured transgender who wants so desperately to be anything other than himself. There is a lot of imagery in this film, and one could argue that there’s too much. From moths to harvesting skin, to anagrams (which in itself is a clue as they portray a thing that isn’t what it appears to be), we’re all but spoon-fed the driving force behind Jame Gumb’s crimes.

But that’s just me over-analyzing. Nit-picking, if you will. Because I, like 95 percent of the people who rated it on Rotten Tomatoes, loved it. It was raw, gritty, smart, artistic and scary. We can all remember the way we felt the first time we saw a green-hued Clarice stumbling blindly through the dark while Buffalo Bill reaches out in a sick desire to touch her. Aside from that, I think it’s the only time I’ve ever hoped a dog would fall down a well.

But the breakout performance, the one that sticks out in everybody’s mind, is that of Anthony Hopkin’s portrayal of the cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter. So ingrained on our collective memories, is the image of a large, proper Englishman who loves nothing more than human liver and Chianti, that it’s difficult to picture anybody else playing him. It’s easy to forget that Lecter is of German descent, and should, by all accounts, have a German accent. When I first saw the TV series Hannibal, I was so turned off by the new take on the character I couldn’t get through the first episode. That’s all changed now, of course, and I find Mads Mikkelsen’s turn with the character very good (even if it’s more of a Dutch accent than German…).

Silence of the Lambs is about as close to cinematic perfection as one can get, and that is owing a lot to the cast, screenplay, and original source material by Thomas Harris. I mention the original author so late in my post because I touted his genius last week, and that part of me feels the success of this movie resulted in two less-than-worthy successors: Hannibal and Hannibal Rising.

So what is it about Lecter that people love in small doses, but find hard to, ahem, swallow, in large portions? I think a lot of it is the mysteriousness of his character in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. We are presented with a psycho that has been convicted of such heinous crimes, that they’ve become lore. He is the basis of the monster under our bed. He represents the worse that could happen to us if we become a census-taker.

But in larger roles, he becomes a caricature of a psycho. In short, Hannibal Lecter is scary because he isn’t understood. Hannibal Lecter is scary because we don’t want to know him.