Hannibal
(2001)
Thomas Harris resoundlingly trashed his greatest creation,
and pretty much any critical respect, with Hannibal.
His novels were pretty big deals even before Jonathan Demme adapted The Silence of the Lambs was, but
anticipation for his next reached fever pitch in its aftermath. And he couldn’t not deal with what happened next to his
cultured cannibal, now could he? The overriding impression that comes across from
the novel is contempt; for Clarice Starling, for reader expectations, for the
millstone that Hannibal Lecter had become. So Harris makes his audience suffer
with him. The best thing Dino De Laurentis and his scriptwriters could have
done was take the title and ignore the rest, but in a rare example of not
changing the source material enough they
managed to satisfy no one. At least some of that is probably down to the amount
De Laurentis stumped up for the tome.
It’s been suggested Harris indulged in intentional sabotage;
an unfilmable book to fulfil a publisher’s obligation. If that were the, case
he surely wouldn’t have written of Clarice Starling, the protagonist he
effectively dismantles after making such a great character in Silence, “I dreaded doing Hannibal,
dreaded the personal wear and tear, dreaded the choices I would have to watch,
feared for Starling. In the end I let them go, as you must let characters go…
“ One might suggest he took leave of his senses as well as his creations but,
since he doesn’t give interviews, it would be difficult to ascertain.
I’d read all three of his previous novels, but the
disappointment of Hannibal swore me
off Hannibal Rising. Certainly, until
(if) he comes up with another character or story. No one is holding their
breath, now he’s disappointed several times in a row. One might ask why he
returned to the dried up well with Hannibal
Rising but the answer appears to be Dino De Laurentis, the loud-mouthed and
often not even very good producer. He takes the dubious credit for milking the
franchise dry (and employing Brett
Ratner to remake Red Dragon) by telling
the author he’d go ahead and do an origins story himself if Harris didn’t yield.
The specimen Harris came up with after the eleven-year gap
between Lecter yarns wasn’t the feast of intricate bedazzlement one might have expected.
Lurid, crass, and ultimately physically and emotionally gross, it sacrificed
plotting for a sagging expanse. Hannibal
was devoid of real suspense, a landscape in which Lecter waltzes around and
about as the now enthroned hero of the story. He slices and dices hither and
thither until finally he wins Clarice for himself in the ultimate authorial
betrayal (Harris was right to dread his own worst instincts for her).
Hannibal the movie
wasn’t quite having that. Jodie Foster blanched at where the book took Clarice,
quite understandably, and even the enticement of an altered ending couldn’t
tempt her back. Not wholly surprising, since the character suffers the biggest
insult to audience investment in a major motion picture since Newt and Hicks
were unceremoniously dumped off screen between Aliens and Alien 3. The
now supporting character is still
drugged and has to sit and watch while Lecter feeds Ray Liotta’s loathsome Paul
Krendler (all the characters, bar Giancarlo Giannini’s Italian police
inspector, are grotesque caricatures, which rather fits Scott’s cartoon-shot-as-art
film approach) his own brains. The slender difference is that Clarice, having
spent the film shot, suspended, berated and abused, musters a tiny triumph when
she handcuffs Hannibal to a fridge instead of waltzing off into the sunset with
him as a kind-of-willing bride of Frankenstein.
De Laurentis, as vulgar as the movies he favours, couldn’t keep his mouth shut about Foster demurring either. “As an audience, I see Julianne Moore and,
oh, I want to go in bed with her. I see Jodie Foster – no way”. Apart from speaking
for himself, mate, it was a rather childish, sour grapes way of addressing the
subject. Foster was right, simply. Reliable as Moore is, no one talks about her
Clarice Starling because her only relevance in the movie is the disservice the
character has been done. No one’s talking about how “sexy” this Clarice is
because it’s quite beside the point (unless De Laurentis really thought
audiences would be titillated by the lopsided, disfigured romance).
Hannibal’s a dark movie, but not in a good way. That would be Silence, where there is light at the end
of the tunnel (but more respite than salvation). Hannibal has only degradation to revel in, ironically given
Hannibal’s attendance to all things artistic and pure. The writers on the
picture, Steven Zaillian and David Mamet, are both quality scribes, although
Zaillian’s career has been the patchier. It’s telling that not just Foster, but
also Ted Tally (who did pen the
second adaptation of Red Dragon, but
was dismayed by Hannibal’s “excesses”) and Jonathan Demme, weren’t
lining up for a second bite. De Laurentis didn’t parade disparaging remarks
about either of those two, however. A fine discerner of quality, he also
described Manhunter as “no good”. Of course, when he got the
chance to do his preferred version, it was
actually was no good.
So we come to Ridley Scott. In a way, this is a return to
the sophomore ground of Alien. But
only in a way. That was a case of Scott able to transcend material through
sheer attention to atmosphere and detail: world building. His affinity for the
same grew increasingly patchy after the failure of Legend, and the Italian producer approached Sir Ridders at the same
time he had decided to up his work rate; Gladiator,
this, and Black Hawk Down followed
each other in quick succession. To be fair to Scott (in that, his predilection
for making dodgy scripts throughout his career shows the wrong kind of
consistency) he identified the problems with the ending. It’s just that semi-addressing
it can’t remedy the picture’s inherently rotten structure.
Whether Mamet’s draft was a “stunningly bad” as has been suggested, Zaillian is generally
credited with the not really that workable finished screenplay. Scott evidently
thought so, as he’s worked from Zaillian scripts twice since. The problem is
fundamental. The elegance and balance of the previous templates, where manhunts
are sustained by interludes with the uber-serial killer and getting to know the
not entirely unsympathetic central psycho, has been replaced by something
listless and melodramatic. The “guest” monster is merely focussed on the star
serial killer who disfigured him. As a consequence, Hannibal regresses to a
Freddy or Jason with a bit of panache. He’s a colourful death wielder who
reveals himself from the shadows and kills with a quip and comment about the
décor. The result isn’t exactly boring, but neither it certainly isn’t riveting.
It’s a sort-of fascinating botch up, tasteless and dismaying but with
occasional flashes of what it might have been.
There are some
good ideas. For example, Barney (Frankie Faison, a veteran of the first four
Lecter movies) selling Lecter memorabilia manages to neatly comment not only on
the cult of serial killers generally but also the following of Silence. One might charitably describe
Gary Oldman’s Mason Verger as a similar take; he’s the number one fan (but we
had this in Red Dragon, so it’s
nothing new).
Gone is the restraint of a carefully devised antagonist
Instead, Mason is beyond broad and fashioned in the most rudimentary style.
Oldman was reputedly the second choice after Christopher Reeve (really, whose
sicko idea was that?). Almost the first thing Clarice says to him is, we “don’t need to know about the sex offences”.
This is the clumsiest of shorthand, barring him actually saying, “I’m the
villain”. We see sans-prosthetics Oldman briefly in the popper/face peeling
episode (“It seemed like a good idea at
the time”), but it’s more effective in the TV iteration.
At least the death of Verger is much more appropriate than
the silliness of the book (at the hands of his muscle-bound sister Margot) as
Zeljko Ivaenk’s Dr Doemling is invited to dispose of the master who has been
such a bane of his life (“Hey Kordell.
Why don’t you push him in? And you can always say it was me”).
Hopkins, well he’s never less than entertaining. But years
of parodies have made the returned Lecter an instantaneous caricature of
himself. As a guy who likes to keep working, it’s perhaps no surprise Hopkins
was up for it (and Red Dragon, within
a year), but even he expressed between the lines reservations. His definition
of a killer who “preferred to eat the
rude” is even more of a ham landing than Silence, if that’s possible. There the scenery chewing worked to
the advantage of the wholer film, a curious relief from the debasement of the
main case.
Here, Hopkins is still delivered some notable moments. The
encounter with the pickpocket, who comes out the worse (“I got it”) is up there with anything Scott has done. The meeting
with Inspector Pazzi and his wife at the opera is a concise exercise in
simmering tension. And, the reveal of the handcuffing elicits a response of
almost zestful fascination at being faced with a conundrum (“Now, that’s really interesting, Clarice”).
Mostly, however, Lecter is a chance to embrace every cheap
shot possible. This is a movie for those who would reject Freddy Kreuger but
think Lecter is palatable. Until they see him in action, that is. Lines get a
laugh (“On the related subject, I must
confess, I’m giving very serious thought to eating your wife”) but it
doesn’t mean they aren’t crude in a way Hannibal himself might find
objectionable if he wasn’t delivering them (“What’s it to be? Bowels in or bowels out?”) The conclusion with him
feeding a child brains is obvious to the point of self-parody. When it’s all only about Lecter, rather than focussing
on him as motivator, the engine breaks down; concise bursts of energy no longer
are brought to bear, and he becomes too much of a good thing.
By the time Hannibal has scalped Krendler (Liotta at his
most gleefully unsavoury, but essaying a character so repulsive he’s
ridiculous; “That smells great”) the movie
has long since lost the slenderest grip on suspension of disbelief. Which means
it really has become a cartoon. Yet the
problem with this is, the excesses of Hannibal
are never “fun”. Scott doesn’t make fun films; look at A Good Year (which I sort of, half like despite itself, but it’s
evidence that a light touch is not in
Ridley’s repertoire).
The Florence location shoot looks very nice, but Scott’s
aesthetic has a kind of passionless sheen washed across it by this point. High
shutter speeds used so distractingly so such that one wonders at a gimmick gone
so spectacularly wrong. These, and blundering slow motion, wholly fail to
service the story. It’s rather sad to see a director at once familiarly
accomplished but also firmly derivative. The shutter speeds were a “new”
discovery, and would infect further features.
The spectre of Seven
also lurks over the proceedings, but with absolutely none of that picture’s unerring
ability to disturb. There are the titles, (including a cheesy face of Hopkins
in some pigeons) and the general aesthetic.
But this is a graceless version where you see all of the killer all of the
time and there’s no investigation to speak of. Hans Zimmer’s classically
infused score is unable to temper the grossness.
Even the focus on Lecter wouldn’t necessarily have killed the book or novel (Harris problem, in
succumbing to the lure of Lecter, is that he couldn’t really use the same
framework a third time and not be called out; the problem is also, he didn’t
have anything with which to replace it) if Clarice Starling had remained
intact. But she’s been systematically undermined, by her creator and the police
force around her. Sure, one can argue this is a commentary on how power
corrupts (Krendler; Pazzi, the sympathetic man who falls victim to the need to
keep much a younger wife in finery). But it shouldn’t be at the expense of your
once main character. Not if you’re going to offer her nothing in return (one is
reminded of the offhand manner in which Will Graham is dismissed in Silence; while this is nothing new, it
is much, much uglier here). At one point Starling is asked, “Why are you so resented Clarice?” and
one might ask the same of Harris.
That isn’t the end of the matter, though. Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal betrays the character of Will
Graham every bit as fundamentally as this Hannibal
betrays Clarice, only this time to (mystifying) popular acclaim. Ridley Scott’s Hannibal is an immaculate production of
a ghoulishly empty upset vessel. It did the trick for De Laurentis, making a
heap of money. Accordingly, it added to Scott’s cachet as a suddenly bankable
director again (it only took 20 years to get back there). But it also tarnished
him. A director who had never made a sequel may have seen it as a challenge to fashion
a silk purse from the man-eating pig of a project, but iffy material would continue
to guide him from hereon out. Occasionally he would hit on something decent,
but never something great. Harris’ milieu worked best when there was underlying
restraint and conviction counter-balancing the more overwrought elements. Demme
and Mann understood that. No one else has since.
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