Ron Does Stuff

We’re on the third film featuring Hannibal Lecter now and I gotta say putting in the work to read the books and watching these adaptations have been better for my mental health than the doomscrolling I’ve been doing on social media. Let’s get right into this film!

This adaptation comes 10 years after the celebrate adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs and two years after the publication of Hannibal and it definitely has its work cut out for it. It’s got a prestigious pedigree to live up to when it comes to adaptations, so I’m prone to give it a little more leeway. It can’t be any worse than Red Dragon.

Immediately from the opening you can definitely tell that this is a different director, but not in a bland way like you get with the Red Dragon adaptation. It’s not as sparse as The Silence of the Lambs but there’s a theatricality to it that even a rube like me can recognize and appreciate. And I approve of how the scenes have been moved around and some characters merged or slightly altered. It’s smart and understandable decisions and really is an improvement from Red Dragon. Actually, it’s better to say that Red Dragon should have maybe taken a few cues from this film because while that adaptation was more faithful, it lacked that little oomph that would have made it at the very least an interesting film.

We’ve also got a new Clarice Starling here in Julianne Moore and right off the bat I wanna make it clear that I do not accept Julianne Moore slander. Shut your filthy mouth if you have anything bad to say about her in this movie. She’s maintaining the accent Jodie Foster had in The Silence of the Lambs or at least I think it’s in the same region? I don’t know I’m not American! But she does take Clarice to a more expressive place than Jodie. They way Jodie does it is through controlled expressions and brimming tears that don’t quite fall from her eyes. Julianne sobs. Two different interpretations that I think are both good!

I don’t know about Ray Liotta as a person because I haven’t followed his personal life but he sure does sleazy really well! But the scene stealer here is Gary Oldman acting his face off — pun intended — through amazing prosthetics as Mason Verger.

Just like in the book, the sexism that Clarice faces is amped up and I have to admit that it’s not one of my favorite parts of the movie. It’s just that it’s so obvious, as opposed to the subtler ways that Jonathan Demme did it in the previous film. It’s not as hit you in the head as it is in Brett Ratner’s work, at least.

I do like that Anthony Hopkins still retains that menace he had in The Silence of the Lambs here, if in a more theatrical way. Roger Ebert in his review of this film said that Ridley Scott was following the Grand Guignol tradition and I think that’s the best way to describe the film and the choices the actors make for their characters. And to be fair to the cast and crew of this movie, it’s also the same direction that the book took.

Unfortunately, taking that different direction won’t necessarily be accepted by the audience. In much the same way I can understand why the book received a mixed reception from readers, I can also understand why this film received the same mixed response.

I don’t necessarily think the new direction is what hobbles the film. I do agree with critics at the time who pointed out that its greatest weakness is the lack of interaction between Clarice and Hannibal, which again you can’t fully blame on the production itself because that’s how it was in the book. But that’s what really brought the Jonathan Demme film to the heights it did and we only get a little taste of that in this movie during the climactic dinner scene which I admit I was mesmerized by.

In the end, I think Hannibal did the best it could with what it had to work with and it’s thankfully lifted up by great performances from Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore.