'I'm having an old friend for dinner.'

Rating: 10/10 (6 September 2005)

I ate 'The Silence of the Lambs' up the first time I saw it and I've gone back for more who knows how many times. I can clean my plate and watch the whole thing, or just snack on certain scenes and be satiated. It is fine dining.
I admit it's a little bizarre, but if I'm in low spirits I sometimes put *this* movie on to cheer myself up, especially if I'm depressed because I've watched some garbage modern movie. The sheer perfection of it never fails to raise me up a little, and the fact that it was made in 1991 gives me hope that the current crop of Hollywood actors and directors isn't unremittingly bad.
The scenes between Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster are masterful, they're like the cadenzas to a violin concerto. I've watched those scenes by themselves about twice as often as I've seen the full movie. To see them feeding off each others performances is beautiful, a feast in itself, it doesn't even require fava beans or a nice chianti.
But it isn't just Hopkins and Foster. There really isn't a poor performance in the entire film, maybe it's because I'm biased and I've seen it two dozen times but it seems like even the actors in the bit parts are far above average. The bug guys, Miggs, the deputies at the funeral home in Elk River, the chauffeur who "detests physical labor."
Jonathan Demme's directing is so brilliantly subtle that it's easy to overlook given the gripping story and the incredible acting, but the last time I watched the entire movie I did indeed, "feel eyes moving over Clarice's body." I'd read about this before, and undoubtedly processed it subconsciously, but I'd never seen it so starkly. The fact is that throughout the movie men are staring at Jodie Foster, judging her, ordering her around, lusting after her, and finally trying to kill her. This produces an undercurrent of suspense even in scenes that don't necessarily have any other suspenseful elements.
Finally, that they managed to do all this and still keep it so realistically lurid is, to me, nothing short of amazing. The pictures of the flayed girls, the bloody fingernail stuck in the wall of the pit, whatever that thing is in the bathtub, it's all so marvelously grotesque you get the feeling that certain too-polite elements of society would love to shun it, but the film is so good that it demands to be watched.