Director Report Card: Ridley Scott (2001) - Part 1

12. Hannibal

While filming “Gladiator,” super-producer Dino de Laurentiis offered Ridley Scott the chance to direct “Hannibal.” He initially turned the job down, mistaking it for a film about Hannibal the Conqueror and being disinterested in making another historical epic so soon. Scott was obviously unaware that Thomas Harris, after a decade of rabid fan demand, finally wrote a sequel to “Silence of the Lambs.” De Laurentiis purchased the film rights, for ten million dollars, the day Harris finished the book. The cannibalistic Dr. Lecter had become a beloved pop culture icon in the intervening decade and the public eagerly greeted the book. The material, however, repulsed Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster, who declined offers to reprise their roles from “Lambs.” Only Anthony Hopkins would return and, in many people's eyes, he was the only one that mattered anyway. With Scott stepping into Demme's place, “Hannibal” would attempt to bring Harris' gruesome novel to the big screen.

Hannibal Lecter – cannibal, serial killer, genius – has remained a wanted fugitive for ten years. Clarice Starling has become a top-ranking FBI agent but, following a botched drug raid, is publicly disgraced. This is when Lecter, currently hiding out in Florence, writes her a letter. This also catches the attention of Mason Verger, a depraved millionaire who was left hideously deformed by Lecter. Verger is obsessed with capturing Hannibal and enacting an elaborate revenge against him. He begins to use Starling as a pawn in his plan to lure the notorious doctor out. Hannibal the Cannibal, of course, is not so easily manipulated. 

With “Silence of the Lambs,” Jonathan Demme and his team achieved the impossible: They made a grisly horror-thriller so effective, so classy, that the Academy was forced to give it five Oscars. With “Hannibal,” Thomas Harris wrote a follow-up so sprawling and macabre that some interpret it as a brutal rebuffing of the previous book's fan base. A plot involving a viciously disfigured child-molester, bloodthirsty hogs, and a man being fed his own brains proved far more challenging to adapt. The film ejects the book's more grotesque and far-fetched plot points. Such as Verger's bodybuilder lesbian sister, who murders him via cattle prod sodomy and forceful application of a moray eel, or Lecter's sudden mastery of hypnotism. Yet even after being cleaned up for cinema, “Hannibal” is still Grand Guignol at best. At worst, it's a sequel that tramples all over the respectability of the original. 

Maybe the most outrageous choice Harris made with “Hannibal” was to change the titular serial killer from a terrifying villain into something of an antihero. “Silence of the Lambs” already made Hannibal Lecter impossibly brilliant and unforgettably charismatic. The sequel practically gives him superpowers. He holds the very public position of an art teacher, yet still goes undetected for years. He's perpetually one step ahead of everyone who pursues him. He slashes an attacker in the face and sends him flying across the room. He causes a devoted guard dog to back down with only a placid glance. His status as a genius appreciator of the arts, fine culture, and gourmet dining is further emphasized. Lecter is no less of a cannibalistic killer than before but the film, and Harris' book, seems to respect and admire him.

The change in attitude towards Hannibal is most obvious in who he targets. Lecter's victims are, for the most part, not innocent by-standers. They are mostly bad guys who arguably deserve their bloody fates. Lecter's most sympathetic victim is an Italian police officer with financial problems who tries to claim the FBI's reward for Lecter for his own use. In order to make a cannibalistic serial killer seem charming in comparison, “Hannibal” creates a truly depraved rogues gallery for the villain to dispatch. This includes an FBI director so blatantly sexist, he can't go a single minute without degrading women or sexually harassing someone. Mason Verger, meanwhile, is exaggerated in his vileness. He's idle rich and inhumanely scarred and a remorseless child-molester and devises a comically brutal form of revenge against Hannibal. Making his opponents so ridiculously evil drawls further attention to Lecter's transformation from a frightening villain to a bizarre wish-fulfillment figure.

Ridley Scott, obviously aware of the excesses of this story, takes what was probably the best approach to this material. He essentially makes the film an extended act of gory camp. “Hannibal” is pretty aware of how ridiculous it is. Hannibal foreshadows Inspector Pazzi – descendant of the notorious Pazzi family of Florence – so heavily, that it becomes oddly funny. As a sarcastic nod towards its title character's unique culinary habits, the film dots references to eating all throughout the movie. Whether that be a hog-shaped fountain in Florence – also foreshadowing of those flesh-hungry pigs – or crude double entendres about “eating” a woman. The movie's bloodshed eventually gets so implausible that laughter is really the only appropriate response. 

Anthony Hopkins is really the main person who holds this excessive affair together. He clearly understands that “Hannibal” is a different sort of movie than “Silence of the Lambs.” To match the tone of cartoonish horror, Hopkins becomes a complete ham. He gleefully leans into Hannibal's – let's be honest – goofy American accent, exaggerating every word in that particular cadence. He grins like a shark who smells blood in the water throughout many of the film's scenes. He so clearly delights in playing everyone around him like a puppet, that the viewer can't help but smile along with the flesh-eating madman. Within this context, Hannibal's moments of animal-like rage even come off as calculated acts of manipulation. Hopkins is obviously having a ball playing such an unflappably brilliant adversary. 

Ridley Scott matches the script's outrageous content and the tone of camp with a lot of visual bombast. Some of this doesn't work, such as a sped-up shot of trees over a road or some ill-advised shaky-cam. Naturally, there's a lot of stylized lighting. Such as a blade of light shinning on Hannibal's face, as he subtly intimidates Pazzi. That man's death, a combined hanging/disemboweling, is similarly handsomely lit. Really, a guy dropping off a balcony and his guts spooling out should not look this pretty. That approach to violence continues throughout the whole film. A stab to the gut produces a fountain of blood. A head gloriously bursts when a man-eating pig seizes it with his massive maw. And that's not even mentioning the utter grotesqueness of the brain-eating sequence. Scott scores the majority of the film to opera, in case you didn't that out the larger-than-life quality of the bloodshed was all very intentional. 

You've noticed, throughout this review, I've barely mentioned Clarice. Another reason why Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster turned down the sequel is both disliked how Harris' novel treated Starling. Indeed, Clarice undergoes an unexpected transformation in the sequel. Sometimes, she's treated like an action hero, getting involved in big shootouts and gunning down bad guys. Jodie Foster's Academy-winning take on the character was going to be hard to top. Julianne Moore, though a brilliant actress, is not up to the challenge. She imitates the West Virginian accent Foster perfected to an unconvincing degree. She's not believable in shoot-outs and seems largely tossed about by the material. 

Really, Moore's out-of-tune performance is hardly her fault. Despite her action hero status, most of the movie defines Clarice by her relationship with the male characters. She's nearly as obsessed with Hannibal as Hannibal is with her, spending most of the movie waiting for him to return. In the bloody climax, Hannibal even has to rescue Clarice. He hefts her up into his arms in what's either a knowing invocation of the classic Monster's Touch pose or a perverse romantic gesture. “Perverse romance” is obviously what was on Thomas Harris' mind. The literary “Hannibal” notoriously ended with Hannibal and Clarice falling in love, the feminist icon brainwashed into being the perfect girlfriend to Harris' overpowered supervillain. The movie ditches the book's romantic ending but Clarice and Hannibal's relationship – mutual respect laced with intense fear – still bends in a weirdly non-platonic direction that can't help but read as wrong-headed.

“Hannibal's” screenplay, which David Mamet did a pass on apparently, manages to cleave Harris' subplots down into a more focused whole. Yet the film still has to make some weird story choices. A large percentage of the movie's first hour is focused on Inspector Pazzi and his attempt to locate Lecter. It's very strange that the movie removes Clarice and even Hannibal from so much of its first half, focusing instead of Pazzi's financial problems and his attempts to locate the famous killer. Giancarlo Giannini is fine in the part, staying in-control while showing the clear desperation Pazzi has to pursue Lecter like this. The scene where Pazzi and Hannibal move a painting together is one of the sequel's few moments of genuine suspense, as we know Hannibal is obviously aware the cop knows who he is but we don't know when he'll strike. Yet it's still weird that the movie spends so much time on a character designed just to die. 

Matching Hopkins and most of the movie's creative choices is an equally over-the-top supporting cast. Gary Oldman is buried under some truly grotesque and life-like make-up as Verger. His face disguised and even going uncredited due to various reasons, Oldman is allowed to create a ghoulishly villainous character. A depraved predator who relishes in his own evilness, Verger's based-on-a-possibly-true-story disfiguring merely made his internal hideousness external. Oldman is clearly enjoying a chance to discard all actorly tact and create a beautifully vile antagonist. Ray Liotta, meanwhile, plays the ludicrously sexist FBI director as a horrible bonehead. He's so dumb that he genuinely seems like he can't help being so horrid. When Lecter feeds him his own brain, it makes his brainless behavior literal. Once again, Lecter is unambiguously evil but still reveals the truth through his butchery.

Much like its literary counterpart, “Hannibal” received a mixed reaction from critics. Some were able to vibe with the movie's campy, theatrical carnage. Others were annoyed that something so knowingly pulpy was presented as a follow-up to such a respected film. On the other hand, audiences – if you'll excuse the pun – ate it up. The movie grossed 375 million, which is a lot for such a blood-soaked motion picture. I recall it being an enormous hit with my middle school cafeteria buddies, who deemed the film's elaborate butchery “bitchin'” and “sick.” I'm too much of a fan of campy horror bullshit myself not to sort of love “Hannibal.” It's still kind of a mess but it knows exactly what kind of movie it is. Everyone involved was determined to make this ludicrous, sometimes insulting story as entertaining as possible. And they definitely succeeded to a certain degree. [Grade: B]