Taut film-making that results in a chilling and influential psychological thriller

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2007)

The late Gene Siskel hated "The Silence of the Lambs," thinking of it as being far too gruesome and distasteful and as having zero originality to it. Roger Ebert gave the 3.5 out of 4 stars, saying that he did enjoy the film but that some scenes were lacking, such as the ending.
Siskel missed the point. The chill from "The Silence of the Lambs" doesn't come from revolutionary originality, which it doesn't have. The chill of "The Silence of the Lambs" is in how it maximizes fear and suspense in a plot that one could simply describe as "police on the hunt for a serial killer." It is here where "The Silence of the Lambs" set the bar; it takes a B-movie concept and raises it to the level of a taut A-level thriller.
The plot has the FBI on the hunt for a serial killer known as "Buffalo Bill" (played by Ted Levine). Stuck, the lead investigator (played by Scott Glenn) wants to get the perspective of another serial killer, to try and see inside the psychotic mind. He recruits the young FBI trainee Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) to talk to the brilliant and cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins). Lecter agrees to help Starling, but only if she will grant him the sadistic pleasure of allowing him to see inside her mind.
Even though the plot is about Buffalo Bill, with Lecter only having 16 minutes on screen in a 2-hour movie, Lecter and Starling are way more interesting and end up being the driving force for the film. In many films, an excellent performance by the villain can steal the show away from the hero. (Tim Burton's "Batman," featuring a brilliant performance by Jack Nicholson as The Joker, is a prime example of this.) In "The Silence of the Lambs," we have strong performances by both of the lead actors. Hopkins' Lecter is clearly everybody's favorite character, but Foster's performance as Starling is powerful enough to not get eclipsed by Hopkins.
Not getting eclipsed is something of a theme for this film. Our heroine is not trying to be heroic. Starling is strong and courageous and could kick anyone's butt, and yet she comes across as vulnerable. She is a woman in a man's world and everywhere she goes, there is a sense of being dominated. She is 5'3" in a film where most other characters are over 6' tall. (The camera often skillfully has Starling occupying only the lower half of the frame; seeing so much space above her head makes her look shorter and more vulnerable.) Her black hair (which is different from Foster's natural light brown) makes her appear paler than she really is. Other characters are always hitting on her. She always whispers and is always giving a nervous smile. Even her slight Southern accent gives her a "country girl" appeal that helps the audience identify with her. Starling is an FBI agent-in-training and is clearly quite skilled at handling dangerous situations, but she still shares our vulnerabilities. As a result of this, her fears are our fears. This is the true skill of Jodie Foster's performance; she manages to play Starling as a woman of great strength and vulnerability at once.
Credit should also go to the film-makers. One strong point is their choice to only be selectively gruesome. This is one key difference between "The Silence of the Lambs" and garden-variety serial killer movies. The latter often derive their scares by showing incredibly brutal images and portraying utterly disgusting scenarios. Fear is generated by the audience's own horrified reaction to what is being shown on screen. "The Silence of the Lambs" does not give in to that temptation though. It casually shows us several rather gruesome images to get us nervous, but then keeps some of the most disturbing stuff cleverly off-camera. Of course, this serves to only make them scarier; what could be so gruesome that not even this creepy film is willing to show it on camera?
I do have criticisms. My main complaint is that Buffalo Bill is a lightweight who left me longing for the much more interesting and menacing Hannibal Lecter. Buffalo Bill is sick, twisted, and downright nauseating, but he also is a coward, who has to resort to trickery and gadgetry to make himself formidable. Lecter, on the other hand, has all the tools he needs right there in his brain. He is the smartest character in the film and he knows it and he loves it. He is so charismatic that he can enter the mind of anyone, no matter how hard they resist. This makes Lecter scary even when he is off-camera. Buffalo Bill is not really all that scary even when he's on camera; he's more just plain gross.
The thrill of this movie is psychological. We don't feel thrilled because of cool action sequences or original plot ideas but rather because of the fear that we can relate to and the mind games that Lecter plays. Something of a void is left in scenes in the latter half of the film, where Lecter is absent. (Here, I agree with Ebert.) Nonetheless, Foster's performance makes up for that. Even in the final showdown with Buffalo Bill, the thrill is still there because we feel Starling's fear, even though the audience has not been particularly scared of Buffalo Bill up until now. (Here, I disagree with Ebert, who feels the showdown is lacking.)
"The Silence of the Lambs" is thrilling and chilling. The main villain is a lightweight, but the secondary villain is among the most menacing and evil in cinema history. I think that after we walk away from this film, we somehow are left with the feeling that, at least for those 2 hours, Hannibal Lecter managed to get inside our own minds as well.