A Big Fish in a Small if Overcrowded Pond

Rating: 7/10 (31 January 2013)

"The Silence of the Lambs" was the Big Film of 1991. It cleaned up at the Academy Awards, becoming only the third film in history to win the "Big Five" Oscars of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Writing, a feat which eluded many other Big Films. (The other two films to achieve the feat were "It Happened One Night" in 1934 and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in 1975). And yet, even though I can appreciate its many good points, it has never really been a favourite of mine.
The reason it has never been a favourite of mine is probably that I don't like serial killer films very much. More recent essays in the genre such as "The Bone Collector", "Se7en" and "Copycat" have struck me as very overrated and as having little to do with real-life crime. "Zodiac", which provided a fictitious solution to a real crime, was both dull and distasteful in the way that it branded a (safely dead) real individual as the killer. Each of these films revolved around some sort of gimmick; in the case of "The Bone Collector", for example, the gimmick was a brilliant but disabled detective, and in "Se7en" it was a killer who based his pattern of killing around the Seven Deadly Sins.
The gimmick in "The Silence of the Lambs" is the concept of one serial killer helping the FBI to capture another. It was not the first film to feature the character of Hannibal Lecter (that was "Manhunter" from five years earlier), but it was the one that made him famous. Lecter is brilliant psychiatrist who also happens to be a cannibalistic serial killer. Because of Lecter's insights into the criminal mind, the FBI seek his help in their pursuit of a serial killer nicknamed "Buffalo Bill", who kidnaps and murders women, then skins their corpses.
"The Silence of the Lambs" shares one feature in common with "The Bone Collector" and "Copycat". All three films feature a detective who is for some reason unable to investigate the crime in person, so the actual leg-work is done by a keen but inexperienced female associate. In "The Bone Collector" the detective is physically disabled; in "Copycat" she is confined to her apartment by severe agoraphobia. In this film it is Lecter rather than Clarice's superior Jack Crawford who is effectively the lead detective, but as he is incarcerated in a hospital for the criminally insane the actual investigative work has to be performed by Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee.
The two Oscars I would not dispute are those which went to Jodie Foster as Clarice and Anthony Hopkins as Lecter. Scott Glenn is rather uncharismatic as Crawford, but both Foster and Hopkins are brilliant. There are two sides to Hopkins's personality as an actor. On the one hand he can be excellent playing quiet, reserved or gentlemanly characters, like Dr Treves in "The Elephant Man", Frank Doel in "84 Charing Cross Road", C S Lewis in "Shadowlands" or Stevens in "The Remains of the Day". On the other, he can be equally effective as villainous or monstrous characters, like Lambert Leroux in "Pravda" or Crawford in "Fracture", and Lecter is undoubtedly his most famous creation in this vein. Indeed, Lecter has become one of the most famous villains in the modern cinema, a man who is undoubtedly cultured and intellectually brilliant, possessed of both a rather grave old-world courtesy and a savage low cunning, and morally quite insane, quite incapable of understanding why killing and eating people is considered morally wrong, although he is fully aware that it is illegal. He describes with lip-smacking relish how he ate one individual's liver "with some fava beans and a nice Chianti".
Foster's performance here is perhaps less obviously dramatic than those she gave in two other films from around this period, "The Accused" and "Nell", but Clarice Starling is a rather different character to Nell or Sarah in "The Accused"- quiet, determined and professional, anxious to hide her emotions. She combines well with the more obviously flamboyant Hopkins as Lecter and Clarice start to play complicated mind-games with one another, each trying to get inside the other's head. (The film's rather obscure title derives from a traumatic episode in Clarice's childhood, which Lecter succeeds in worming out of her). There is also a good contribution from Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill.
1991 was not perhaps the greatest year in cinematic history; I doubt very much if "The Silence of the Lambs" would have scooped the "Big Five" had it appeared in the same year as, say, "Dances with Wolves" (the Big Film of 1990) or "Unforgiven" (ditto of 1992). My own choice for Best Picture in 1991 would have been Zhang Yimou's masterly "Raise the Red Lantern", but the Academy is notorious for its dislike of foreign-language films; all films to have won "Best Picture" have been American or British, apart from the French "The Artist"- which contained no spoken dialogue. My favourite American film of the year would probably have been "Cape Fear", but in the early nineties the Academy was equally notorious for its dislike of Martin Scorsese.
"The Silence of the Lambs" is well-directed; Jonathan Demme skilfully handles his material to produce a tense, exciting thriller. Yet despite this, and despite some fine acting, the film never really rises above the limitations of its genre, remaining a combination of Grand Guignol and gruesome crossword puzzle. (Sometimes almost literally so; Lecter shares the crossword compiler's weakness for puns, anagrams and word- games). It may be the best film ever made about a psychopathic criminal, but that only makes it a big fish in a small if overcrowded pond. 7/10