Questionable, but strangely acceptable camp emanates from this chilling, engaging suspense story.

Rating: 10/10 (2 May 2003)

***Warning: SPOILERS herein***
One of the few Best Picture winners (not that the A.A.S. is any great measure of quality), and the only one since I've been alive, that I actually think may have been one of the best pictures of the year it came out, if not the best. It's not without flaws, but it certainly offers some of those most riveting examples of mainstream filmmaking.
The plot: lt. Jack Crawford sends one of his top academy students, Clarice Sterling (played with unwavering focus by Jodie Foster), unbeknownst to her, as a covert, but feeble and desperate attempt to extract information about a serial killer on the loose from genius psychiatrist Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins, who, I imagine, will never be able to usurp this performance) who is incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane. She exchanges information about the killer for biographical details about herself. Through F.B.I. missteps, Lector manipulates the situation towards freedom while guiding Sterling to the killer and recognition for her efforts. All the while, there is the subplot involving the killer and his current victim from her initial kidnapping towards the end of her captivity. The killer feels he is a transsexual failed by society and modern medicine, who takes his aggression out by selecting over-weight females, kidnapping and starving them, before killing them and removing their skins.
The film takes itself mostly seriously with a slightly off-beat tone one could expect from director Jonathan Demme. However, it's the ending, while fun and clever, that throws into question the film's integrity. Did we just witness the emotional journey of a young woman's plight to deal with her childhood ghosts while trying to save another young woman from dying or are we rooting for a truly psychotic man too intelligent and bored with this world while our tongues are pressed firmly in our cheeks? The film is mostly representational of the novel, which has an easier time alluding these questions with its pulpish nature.
Whatever the case, the interaction between Foster and Hopkins are chilling and mesmerizing. The scenes with Ted Levine as James Gumb are mostly gruesome and disturbing, but hardly worth protesting for negative gay stereotyping. (I feel the same sentiment towards Basic Instinct was unfounded; however, it probably did help them both at the box office, I imagine) For a film where you know who the serial killer is from the beginning, it's engaging and suspenseful none-the-less. And Clarice Sterling offers its audience a modern heroine which they embraced, which isn't that frequent, if you think about it. She's just finds herself in the confines of a film whose intentions are somewhat dubious.
The success of `Lambs' ignited an inferno with the serial killer genre wh ich became hugely popular with inferior-quality, even more dishonest films like `Se7en' and `Fallen.' I own a DVD-version of the film and watch scenes every now and then, but mostly for the camp its degenerated to.
10: One of the few films, one can use the term "modern classic," though its not exactly classy.