a few thoughts on a classic

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2008)

One of the things that strikes me whenever I watch 'Silence of the Lambs' again is how different Jodie Foster looks at various points in the movie. I don't know if this is deliberate or just the way her face comes across when filmed from different angles and with different lighting. At the risk of sounding as though I'm only focusing on her physical appearance, she sometimes appears radiantly beautiful, other times cute in a tomboy-ish way, and sometimes downright unattractive. I mention this because there are a number of quirky details in 'Silence of the Lambs' that one only picks up on with repeated viewings, and they all fall together in such a casual, unforced way that it's easy to believe they just happened. But no film turns out this well by accident. The director, Jonathan Demme, might have gotten lucky with one or two shots but I have to believe nearly everything in this movie was calculated to create the exact effect each renders. Anthony Hopkins had, prior to 'Lambs,' never been a favorite actor of mine. I was never particularly impressed with him in any role. In fact, it would be hard to think of one part that Hopkins was really identified with. But if ever the actor and the character and the moment came together in perfect realization, it was in this film. Hopkins grasps the complexities of Hannibal Lecter and presents them in such a way that it is now impossible to think of one and not the other. Just as Thomas Harris does in his books, Lecter is on film depicted as a cannibalistic madman but so much more than that; he is polite, resourceful, intolerant of most other criminals, tasteful, sophisticated... not to mention a genius. Given what Hannibal has done in the past and has every intention of doing in the future, his character would seem the most unlikely to appear even slightly sympathetic to the audience. And yet he does. Clarice Starling is a more straightforward character, easier to figure out, but Jodie Foster embodies her in a similar way. She is single-minded, on an almost holy quest to achieve success as an FBI agent, to rescue the helpless and imprison the guilty. She pushes herself relentlessly though Starling is not typically reflective unless forced into it by Lecter. When he tells her during their first meeting, "You're so ambitious, aren't you?", he has her nailed, dead to rights. Over the course of the film, Hannibal Lecter begins to display other qualities that almost qualify as superhuman. He is immensely strong. He can apparently control and manipulate his body's functions to create false readings. He seems at times capable of both telepathy and empathy. Nothing supernatural is suggested, only such finely-honed skills of observation and reasoning that not even the smallest detail escapes his notice. And most importantly, he never fails at anything he sets out to do. By the end of the film, one is convinced Lecter could have escaped from that jail cell anytime he wanted. In fact, his escape from the cage in Memphis is so improbable that in retrospect it borders on magic. For everything to have happened in the order it did and with the precise timing it needed to happen beggars belief, to say the least. And yet it is so well-staged, and we are so convinced by this point that Hannibal is perfectly capable of pulling it off, the audience never questions it.