This movie takes a real bite out of you!

Rating: 10/10 (22 October 1998)

The normal human being's fear of being attacked, bitten open in a violently impersonal manner and then taken in as food is as old as the first human being's shattering witness of such a primordial act. In the thousands of years of human evolution, intelligence has armored [most of us] against predations of that horrible sort. But even more incomprehensible is an attack, for mere hunger's sake, by one human being upon another! When first we see Dr. Hannibal Lecter, his madness is merely the subject of comment, responsible or otherwise. As we view him [uncomfortably] from the safety of a theatre seat, we can only imagine the deep wells of need which forced him to savage his fellow human beings in this manner, and this makes all the more terrible the awful scene in the Memphis courthouse. Into all this walks Clarice Starling, her innocence and anxiety both touching and troubling. She is essentially tricked into taking the assignment to "interview" Lecter by her superior, Jack Crawford, who callously deems her expendable. She somehow summons the rural courage of her youth, forged from the furnace of her weary sufferings, and becomes the blank sheet for both Crawford's and Lecter's amusement. As the result of being pulled in opposite directions in the murderous tug-of-war between Lecter and Crawford, Starling is almost totally alone in the film. In spite of her genuine liking for Aredlia Mapp, Starling's isolation is nearly so complete as to be claustrophobic. Director Jonathan Demme's finely-nuanced work here is well served. Her enlightenment takes place primarily in darkness, whether the setting is Lecter's cell in the dungeon, or whether the apotheosis takes place in the demon's lair. There are almost no likeable characters in the film save Starling. This makes it easy to root for her to overcome the furies which have pursued her since her tenth year. Clarice's predatory instincts are to bring a vicious psychopath within the scope of punishment. In sharp contrast, the other main characters in the film are possessed of predatory natures of a baser, more primitive kind, whether it is Dr. Frederick Chilton's need for sex, or Crawford's need for control, or Lecter's need to destroy for pleasure. The music score by Howard Shore is reminiscent, in a eerie way, of Bernard Herrmann's work in Psycho. Shore's opening theme foreshadows the loneliness and desperation of Starling's dual quest, which is to kill both beasts: the one without and the one within.