Coveted skins

Rating: Null/10 (26 July 2012)

Manhunter is my Hannibal movie of choice. There aren't many to pick from, but it's the kind of choice you're frequently confronted with and says something about who you are; Alien or Aliens? So maybe this is yours.
These films, to get into it a bit, are an offshoot of the many sophisticated threads that first came together in film noir (yet others led to Lynch). The most self-evident aspect is that they are detective films, but much more pertinently: they are about the effort to see and investigate into a part of your story that you didn't know was so dark. For Clarice, it's the screaming lambs and what it means for her as a person (lamb lost in a callous world). They are about twin-nested-worlds: the rational world of cops and forensic experts where the mind attempts control over narrative, and the semiconscious world of urges, self and powerful intuition that makes it all bubble up in the first place.
The detective can solve the case because she straddles both.
So, these films have power because they're not just about the case or cinematic criminology, that case which is usually wrapped in exotic madness to make you, the viewer, want to keep looking for answers. These answers horrify, assuming we are in sensitive hands, because that madness has, as a fulcrum, actual human beings in pain. We're a long way from Charlie Chan. The difference between detective and killer is not moral right, but having discovered ways to reason with that part of damaged self. Clarice has signed up for the FBI, and the FBI provides a structure (note the staged scenarios in training that allow her to exercise decision-making and control). Our anchor for the entire film is in her world of controlled emotion.
Manhunter is my type of film because of a spin that seems very powerful to me; it ever-so-lightly transfers the anchor to the killer, in a way that we understand that that guy breathes and covets in an actual word, and that world has logic of its own, and that logic affects our logic and vision.
Because we spend time there in ways that make deep sense, his world of latent visions deepens our own.
Demme was not up to it here. So even though well-made, and even though Lecter explains that Buffalo Bill is a child that was hurt, every moment we spend in Bill's world is cheap and sensational. Demme goes to lengths of the silly dance routine in drag, but not so much as a glimpse inside the skin of that man. There is no real shift of vision from the comfortable quest to destroy evil to a more ambiguous nature.
We're just not in sensitive hands here. Because we're not, the sense of lurid spectacle spills over the entire thing: from Lecter's prison block that looks like a medieval dungeon, to the extended crosscutting between houses in the finale that sensationalizes the bleeding obvious.
It's sophisticated and heartfelt on Clarice's end of investigating herself, but on the other end it's a silly potboiler that looks like a Texas Massacre sequel. It captivates but it doesn't deepen.