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Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins carry out a strange dance in the compelling The Silence of the Lambs |
Director: Jonathan Demme
Cast: Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling), Anthony Hopkins (Dr
Hannibal Lecter), Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford), Ted Levine (James “Buffalo Bill”
Gumb), Anthony Heald (Dr Frederick Chilton), Brooke Smith (Catherine Martin),
Diane Baker (Senator Ruth Martin), Kasi Lemmons (Ardelia Mapp), Frankie Faison
(Barney Matthews)
Is there a more unlikely Oscar winner than The Silence of the Lambs? In fact,
double down on that: is there a more unlikely film to have won all five of the
Big Ones – Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay – only the third
film in history to have achieved that (It
Happened One Night and One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest being the others)? Re-watching the film, it’s actually a
triumphant vindication for Hollywood to have chosen a thriller for the ages, a
complex and intriguing puzzle wrapped in an unsettling outer layer of thrills
and horror, as if the academy was (late in the day) finally tipping an award-lined
hat to the film’s spiritual grandfather, Hitchcock himself.
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a trainee FBI agent, in
the final weeks before her graduation. Out of the blue she is plucked from
Quantico by the head of the Behavioural Science Unit, Jack Crawford (Scott
Glenn), to interview notorious psychiatrist-turned-cannibalistic-serial-killer
Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), now interned in a psychiatric
prison-cum-dungeon in Baltimore. Crawford hopes the Lecter might be able to
shed light on the motives of “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine), a serial killer
kidnapping and skinning young women across a number of states. Lecter can shed
some light – but the price is an opportunity to investigate further into the
psyche of the determined and ambitious Starling. A three-way game of
cat-and-mouse between Bill, Clarice and Lecter soon starts to emerge.
Demme’s film is a sublimely made entertainment that
brilliantly pulls together the trappings of multiple genres (there are splashes
of horror, thriller, police procedural, romance and black comedy to name but a
few) into an unsettlingly tense and engrossing whole. It’s truly a film
Hitchcock would have been proud of, a masterfully assembled thrill ride where
every shot serves a purpose, and each scene is carefully constructed to
establish a clear story and push the audience’s buttons. It has two of the best
tense “prolonged misdirects” in film history (wittily signposted in advance by
an early car chase that is revealed in a pull-away to be a training exercise in
Quantico – don’t trust your eyes!) and it brilliantly immerses you in the world
and emotions of Clarice Starling.
Demme’s aim was to get us to empathise above all with
Clarice, as she descends into the dark underbelly of this terrifying world.
Demme uses a carefully selected combination of POV shots and straight-to-camera
addresses to deliberately put us into the position of actually “being” Clarice
Starling. From following her perspective through rooms and corridors, to seeing
the characters she is talking to address the camera directly as if talking to
us, through to carefully placed close-up shots that allow us to study the
thoughts and feelings travelling across Clarice’s face, it brilliantly allows
us to invest overwhelmingly in her without us even really noticing we are doing
it.
And of course that is put together with Jodie Foster’s
extraordinarily brilliant performance in the role. One of the film’s many
strengths is exploring the nature of being a determined, brave and ambitious –
but still slight and feminine – woman in the alpha-male world of crime
investigation. Clarice fends off in virtually every scene not just
discrimination and instant judgement, but a parade of half-spoken advances and
flirtations from male colleagues. Foster’s brilliance is to make a character
who is determined but humane, slightly vulnerable while never weak. She’s the
key driver of the story, but also both an insider and outsider in her world,
partly motivated by a desire to prove herself, partly by an attempt to vanquish
haunting childhood memories of weakness and loss.
It’s these feelings under the surface that attract the interest
of Hannibal Lecter, and the strange dance between them is the heart of the
film’s appeal and it’s magic. Why does Lecter want to know about the facts of
Starling’s life (that quid pro quo he
archly asks for)? Does he want to analyse her? Does he want to help? Does he
want to amuse himself with her terrible memories? Or is he just bored? He
hardly seems to be certain himself, but the intimacy shared revelations provide
is neatly played with by Demme in sequences between the two (they barely share
the frame by the way more than twice) that hum with a tension of danger, but
also a thrill of illicit romance, mixed with incestuous interest (Starling the
orphan, Lecter the father-like man of wisdom helping her catch the killer). And
it works with us as well – we are so invested in Starling that, just like her,
we end up liking Lecter (even though we know we shouldn’t).
Of course it helps that Hannibal Lecter is portrayed in a
performance of magnetic, career-defining brilliance by Hopkins. Hopkins
modestly claimed playing Lecter was easy once you mastered the voice and the
physicality – but that’s to downplay the extraordinary skill mastering those
aspects concern, and the bravura brilliance with which Hopkins plays to the
camera but never tips into absurdism. It’s an arch, knowing, winking
performance that also carries with it an intense, psychotic menace, a delirious
capacity for violence (as we find out). Demme introduces the character
sublimely – after the build-up, his ram-rod stillness, polite manner and
refined behaviour are somehow even more unsettling. Sure Brian Cox in Manhunter may be more conventionally chilling,
but Hopkins is like an elemental demon playing with our childhood bogeyman
fears, a guy who seems even more dangerous as he playfully chats one minute,
then beats you to death with a truncheon the next.
The scenes between these two characters dominate the film
(even if they take up no more than ten minutes of its runtime), and their
relationship (beautifully shot as a game of one cagey upmanship that turns into
semi-flirting, that turns into something in between) defines the movie and its
legacy. Lecter’s magnetism was such that in later movies he would increasingly
become an anti-hero of sorts, a lord of misrule rather than a brutal and
indiscriminate killer, but here he’s terrifying and satanic, just as Starling
is courageous and noble as the lady on a quest.
And that quest targets Buffalo Bill – a deeply unsettling
performance of psychological unease and self-loathing by Ted Levine. The film
was controversial at the time for its killer being both a transsexual and gay
(although the film makes clear it’s a desire to be anyone apart from who he is
that drives all these feelings), especially as at the time these groups were
barely represented positively in the movies. But it also makes for singularly
unsettling character, living in a subterranean cave-like basement, surrounded
by moths, his voice slurred childishly while carrying no sense of shame or
regret for his actions.
The hunt for Bill is the film’s story, and Demme uses the
devices of cinema to make this as tense and unsettling an experience as needed.
The camera prowls terrifyingly around Bill’s domains. Howard Shore’s score makes
a deeply unnerving use of mournful refrains. Frequently scenes – such as the
post-mortem inspection of a victim’s body – are often silently scored, making
the mechanical noises of the investigator’s trade (such as the loudly clicking
and whirring camera) deeply jarring. The film is grim, but relies more on
reaction rather than bathing us in horrors, and implication brings the greatest
terror. Every sequence of the film is perfectly assembled to leave us
struggling to breathe – not least as events place Starling in more and more
peril.
With its playful sense of black comedy, mixed with genuine
terror and thrills, The Silence of the
Lambs genuinely feels like the film Hitchcock was born to make. Everything
in the film is perfectly assembled to serve the film’s aims – there is not a
foot wrong in its assembly, and it’s sad that Demme never hit these sort of
heights again. But the film is like a twisted companion piece to Psycho (only better), and in Hopkins and
Foster produced two landmark performances. While the film engrosses us in
Starling’s struggles in a man’s world, it also overwhelms us with Hopkins’
devilish magnetism and dark mystery. And what to make of the relationship
between Starling and Lecter? It’s a mystery so enigmatic that it continues to
grip today and it’s the secret behind the success of this compelling
masterpiece.
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