**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Ray Liotta, Frankie R. Faison
screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
directed by Ridley Scott
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It is perhaps unfair to compare a sequel to its predecessor, especially one with as tenuous a connection to its predecessor as Hannibal has. With most of the original The Silence of the Lambs personnel having refused to sign on due to various creative differences, the sequel's total stylistic disconnection from its beloved 1991 precursor was probably inevitable. Couple that with the fact that the novel on which it draws can be charitably described as a desperate grasp for royalties and you have a no-win situation that would confound the most dedicated adaptor. Eager though he or she might be to remain faithful to the original's spirit, our hypothetical filmmakers would be forced to define something perfectly contrary to the parent film, something that would be its own picture–a rare enough commodity in the best of times.
But this is not the fate of Hannibal. While it would be very difficult to confuse this latest instalment in the saga of Starling and Lecter with the film that made it possible, it neither makes us forget The Silence of the Lambs nor develops anything latent within it. It's a parasite, bloating itself on the memory of the original and leaving nothing in return. There's enough here to let you know that you're watching a movie–pretty pictures, competent acting, and just enough shock value to keep you from getting bored–but not enough to distinguish it from anything else you might see. The film is strangely without a point of view, seeming to think the very presence of Hannibal Lecter is enough to justify a new film.
Hannibal picks things up 10 years after the disappearance of Dr. Lecter, as his one-time associate Clarice Starling faces a terrible blow to her career. After a Waco-style botch of a drug bust, she has become demonized for having shot a drug czarina holding a baby; this moves Lecter, now posing as an art scholar in Florence, to write what for him amounts to a letter of support. This new lead re-opens the hunt for the mad doctor, a fact which gladdens the heart of wealthy child molester Mason Verger. Maimed and disfigured after a run-in with Lecter, Verger's been plotting his horrible death ever since. After a shady detective (Giancarlo Giannini) in Florence spots him, Lecter is forced to flee back to the USA, where Mason is waiting for him, ready to strike. It's up to Starling to ensure that Lecter stays out of danger–a difficult task, now that the FBI is standing against her.
If you're wondering exactly how a by-the-book FBI agent can be enlisted to look out for a serial killer's well-being, you've hit upon the major flaw of the Thomas Harris novel on which this film is based. That novel, to my mind written for no better reason than the money to be made from it, junked the moral ambiguity that gave The Silence of the Lambs its raison d'être. Centring it on Hannibal Lecter, Harris made hash of the dichotomy between him and Clarice Starling: Whereas in Silence (the movie, anyway) one shuttled back and forth between the id of Lecter and the superego of Clarice Starling, Hannibal is centred solely on the eponymous doctor, turning him into a righteous avenger who only kills bad people. To anyone who treasured the original–or at least the original film–this is a horrible betrayal, especially when Clarice gets drawn into his orbit. It takes what was once a dialogue between two points of view and turns it into a monologue delivered by a tyrant to his subjects.
But this need not have been a crippling blow to the film, which, after all, is free to deviate from its source material in both form and spirit. The novel's many gory situations would certainly be thrilling stuff in the right hands, and its host of decadent characters–singularly revolting Mason Verger, disgraced Italian detective Pazzi, misogynist FBI overlord Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta)–offer all sorts of possibilities in terms of defining the world in which our hero and heroine live. The challenge would be to take a particular stand on the events in the novel, to find an order in the chaos of Harris's vague motivations and frame the heroic deeds of Dr. Lecter with some kind of purpose. Many directors would be up to the challenge (a poll of my friends came up with the names Neil Jordan, David Fincher, and M. Night Shyamalan), but they, unfortunately, have not directed Hannibal. Ridley Scott has, thus taking a desperate situation and making it worse.
Scott, who has been coasting on his association with that overrated classic Blade Runner for too long, is not exactly noted for his obsessive return to common themes. What he is good for is cold and stately visual élan, which often rides roughshod over the core concerns of his films. While he has more than a strong grip on how to make an image beautiful, he's not so good at tying that beauty into meaning–film after Ridley Scott film features meticulously-composed pictures that contradict the thrust of the story and the action. He's strictly an aesthete, and it shows in every shallow, gorgeous shot of Hannibal. The result of his efforts is even worse than that of the novel: Harris's cash-grab had a certain bloodthirsty shock value; Scott's non-committal imagery ensures that the events in his film never resonate.
You'd think that Scott would insist on plenty of operatic set-pieces to better display his flair for composition, but the script manages against all odds to be expository and claustrophobic. Julianne Moore is lost in the now-thankless role of Starling, largely because she just gets barked at and ignored; there's no penetration into her inner life, because Mamet and Zaillian haven't illuminated her humiliation and desperation. Just as bad is what happens to Mason Verger's character–so disgusting in the novel, to the point of collecting the tears of his young victims, he barely registers here, because his crimes are mentioned once in passing. Left with no visual evidence of his evil, his presence has no edge, and he seems to be the villain simply because he's hideously disfigured. This might not be such a bad thing if the dialogue were witty and trenchant, but it's not; not even the good doctor has any truly clever lines, something which ought to be a prerequisite for his character. The results are dry, listless, and only nominally involving.
Hannibal's downfall lies in its inability to take a stand. It's like a bluffed answer on a final exam: the filmmakers have a ballpark idea of what has to be done but they don't know how to develop that idea, resulting in a barely-adequate answer to the question posed by The Silence of the Lambs. By talking (and shooting) around the matter, they ensure that nothing–save perhaps a couple of fitfully gory shocks–manages to hit the viscera; their amorphous intentions mean that the truly resonant material remains untouched. (Imagine a version of The Exorcist in which people only talk about Linda Blair's vomit attacks.) The film is entertaining to a point; the threat of something happening is so great that you can forgive its less inspired passages. But left with no meaning to the madness, the film is a series of events that leads us nowhere. Hannibal seems less like the work of artists conscious of a goal than a science project done in a last-minute panic, its creators ever aware of an encroaching deadline without considering the point of the exercise. Originally published: February 14, 2001.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers If Hannibal is half the movie that The Silence of the Lambs is, the situation is reversed on DVD. Literally. MGM's Hannibal comes on two discs as opposed to the studio's single-platter, repurposed Special Edition of The Silence of the Lambs, and it features roughly twice as many extras. Shall we start our overview of this loaded Hannibal package at the transfer? It's delectable, of course, letterboxed at 1.85:1 and enhanced for 16×9 displays. Nothing about the picture quality exceeded my expectations for a controlled, crystalline, shadow-rich image, but that speaks to my overfamiliarity with the format.
Hannibal is MGM's first DTS disc (presumably because the film was a co-production with DTS shareholder Universal), though the soundtrack isn't, as they say, killer. I found both the Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 mixes rather subdued; only the opening gunfight, a cheat scare, and some pig fury spring all six channels into action. Dialogue, rarely Hannibal's saving grace, is intelligible throughout. Disc One's supplements are trailers for The Silence of the Lambs and the upcoming Windtalkers, plus a tireless commentary track by Ridley Scott indexed according to topics of interest in conjunction with the standard chapters. Scott spends too much time discussing character motivation while glossing over plotholes, but it's a diverting and occasionally illuminating listen.
DISC 2
That it's no masterpiece didn't exactly burden the profitable Hannibal's DVD prospects. Disc 2 begins with "Breaking the Silence: The Making of Hannibal", an all-access, 75-minute documentary by Charles de Lauzirika in five parts: Development; Production; Special Make-Up Effects; Music; Reaction. Of those, the first is fascinating for producers Dino and Martha De Laurentiis' typically glib comments (he on replacing Silence director Jonathan Demme with Ridley Scott: "When one Pope dies, you find another Pope;" she on replacing Silence star Jodie Foster with Julianne Moore: "A dilemma yet totally solvable"), the second and third for their behind-the-scenes footage of the infamous climax. The latter chapters (the whole thing is indexed) are interminable and repetitive, and I'm sorry, but Hans Zimmer's hot-and-bothered riffs don't hold a candle to Howard Shore's lush score for The Silence of the Lambs.
Fourteen deleted scenes with optional Scott commentary do little to fill in the logical gaps left by the act of compressing a 600-page novel into a manageable movie, although stray scenes, such as Lecter seeing Krendler interviewed on television, enrich what we see in the final version. Aside: the much-hyped alternative ending is not nearly so eventful as the unshot conclusion that Scott discusses would've been.
Three multi-angle vignettes offer unique perspectives on various sections of Hannibal: "Anatomy of a Shoot-Out" provides unedited A,B,C, and D roll camera footage (Scott shot the fish market gun battle using up to four cameras simultaneously); "RidleyGrams" is like a flashcard series of storyboard-to-screen comparisons; "Title Design" shows Nick Livesey's effective opening credits sequence in various stages of completion. (Livesey recorded optional commentary, and Scott's snippet of monologue is recycled from Disc 1.) Many of the one-sheet prototypes in "Marketing Gallery" put the final poster art to shame, and here you will also find a teaser, a trailer, and nine TV spots for Hannibal. Seventeen (!) still photo galleries, twenty cast/crew bios, production notes, pages of DVD credits, and a collectible booklet round off this set, which bigger fans of the film than me or Travis should find delicious.
131 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; 2 DVD-9s; Region One; MGM
