Still Frightening and Crisp

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2016)

Clarice Starling is the perfect name for the protagonist of this film. A starling is a bird, a little bird, that comes in flocks. A single starling by itself is weak, innocent, vulnerable. Clarisse is harder to define, but the long 's' sound makes it sound like a wind blowing through a peaceful field. When I hear the name Clarisse, I think of a rich teenage ingénue in a blue dress leaning dreamily on a white balcony.
No, Clarice Starling is not all those things, mostly because she is played by the gritty Jodie Foster, but that is the roll she is cast into at the beginning of the film. She manages to work her way out of her situation as the hunts the serial killer Buffalo Bill, but there is one man who can cast her back into it, one man who can turn her back into a ten-year-old girl and steal away all her personal secrets.
Ladies and gentleman, meet the man, the legend, Hannibal Lecter. Even you've never seen this or even heard of this movie, you've heard of Hannibal Lecter. When AFI released its list of the top 50 heroes and the top 50 villains in all of cinema, Hannibal Lecter was number 1 on the villain list. It's telling that Anthony Hopkins received an Oscar for playing this character despite getting limited screen time. Hannibal can strike fear into Clarisse Starling. He can certainly strike fear into you.
Humanity is afraid of smart people. Smart people can disrupt the current order of things, breezing by without breaking a sweat. Humanity is afraid of crazy people. Crazy people are unburdened by the moors of society, and have no problem breaking down boundaries. Humanity is afraid of stoic people. Stoic people can stand their ground even when the world around them turns to fire and blood, and so they can gain a leg up on their emotional brethren.
Hannibal Lecter is smart, crazy, and stoic. That is a dangerous combination. Smart people are normally not crazy, and even when they are, they usually make an emotional mistake. Crazy people are normally not stoic, and even when they are, they are not smart enough to pull off their schemes. Stoic people are normally not smart, and even when they are, they typically are not crazy enough to disrupt the entire order of things.
In many ways, he is the perfect villain. He even has the perfect villain name. Hannibal rhymes with cannibal, of course, but it is also the name of the famous leader of Carthage, who led elephants over the Alps in the Punic wars in an attempt to destroy the Roman Empire. Lecter, meanwhile, sounds conniving, due to both the combination of the 'l' and the 'k' sounds and its resemblance to the world lecher. It also sounds vaguely similar to the word 'specter', fitting considering his slippery, phantasmal nature. This film and the books that inspired it are great examples on how to create character names that vaguely allude to the character's personalities without being too obvious.
But Hannibal isn't really the villain, now is he? He's surely not the protagonist, but he's helping Clarice on her quest to catch the real villain of the film, Buffalo Bill, a character who is interesting in his own right, but is overshadowed by Lector and Starling. But in a way, his being in the 'hero's aide' role makes him a lot more unsettling. If he were just the villain, the film would still be great, but it wouldn't be as interesting or complex, and we would lose a lot of the Starling/Lecter interactions, which are the highlights of the film.
The ambiguous or outright villainous hero's aide has been done before, but usually the character in question isn't nearly as twisted or nearly as helpful. The character of Lector strikes a deep unease within the audience. His positioning within the story deepens this unease. It is not an unintended side effect that Lector's presence hangs over the story even when he is not directly in it.
As of date, this is the last film to ever win the Big Five Oscars- Picture, Actor, Actress, Director, and Screenplay. It was one of the first major films of the 90's, here to signal that the light and vapid 80's had come to an end. Foster and Hopkins both deliver A-class performances, and the writing weaves together with the direction to tell a perfect story. A frightening, towering, superbly entertaining spectacle, this one film you can't bear to miss.