HANNIBAL
Fed Up
Magnificently malevolent anti-heroes like Dr. Hannibal Lecter often summon up a yen not only for their return, but for their rehabilitation. Thomas Harris' third Lecter novel, Hannibal, was clearly written in a redemptive vein: Harris supplied the previously motivelessly malign Lecter with motivation (his baby sister was eaten by marauding deserters during World War II) and a love life (with disaffected FBI agent, Clarice Starling, upon whom he had practised his own pernicious grand of brief therapy in Silence of the Lambs).
With Hannibal off his feed and comfortably ensconced in Starling's arms, it's difficult to imagine Harris undertaking a fourth Lecter novel. But screenwriters David Mamet and Steve Zallian have left ample room for a screen Hannibal's vastly profitable reappearance by chopping away his cue for revenge, his hots for Starling -- and one hand.
The film's narrative is otherwise reasonably faithful to Harris' design: in the intervening years since Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has settled in Florence under a pseudonym to become a respected Renaissance art historian. Starling (played with tense astringency by Julianne Moore) has seen her career compromised by the envy of her male colleagues and the spite of a randy justice department official, Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta, in his increasingly familiar sleazoid mode).
In Lecter's earlier career as a brilliant forensic psychiatrist, the poor taste rather than the foul deeds of his perverse clientele whetted his appetite for atrocious retribution. He had seduced, then drugged pedophilic zillionaire Mason Verger into stripping off his own face and feeding it to his dogs. A decade later Verger uses his fortune to find Lecter and return the favor, whole hog. Verger's plot to have Lecter gobbled alive by Sardinian boars gruesomely backfires when the discredited Starling assaults Verger's chateau to save Lecter's bacon.
Knocked out by a tranquilizing dart, Clarise is borne off by Lecter; awakens to an elegant dinner he's prepared for her and the spiteful Krendler. Its centerpiece is a gagging feat of culinary neurosurgery performed upon the latter. Suddenly handcuffed by clever Clarise with the cops at the door, Lecter again orchestrates a daring escape with literally disarming cunning.
In pictures such as Alien, Blade Runner, and Thelma and Louise, Ridley Scott conducted intriguing experiments with archeyptal genre fare. He's recently retreated into pumped-up vacuous set pieces like Gladiator and Hannibal: For all of its computer generated wizardry and deft camera work, Hannibal essentially registers as a coldly manipulative, ultimately tedious slasher film, reminiscent of the endless palid clones of Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth.
With Lecter now firmly established in the public imagination as our latest Jason or Freddy, Sir Anthony Hopkins performs his Hannibalistic routine by rote -- coy sadistic double-intendres, lusciously drawn-out syllables, delicate sniffs -- with one eye firmly fixed on his bank-balance. An uncredited Gary Ullman plays the scarified Verger unmemorably, as Hopkins' over-the-top double.
Horror cinema has long been one of my guiltiest of pleasures. But Hannibal hardly stirred my palate for Grand Guignol gore, absent that terminal brainy banquet. The notion of ever more Lecter movies makes the gorge rise. But for true aficianados, the first and arguably the best Lecter film, Manhunter (l986), is being rereleased on DVD at this writing. Based on Red Dragon, Harris' initial book in the series, Manhunter features Brian Cox as a Hannibal infinitely more subtle and scary than the current attenuated Hopkins edition. Bon appetit!