Rhymes with cannibal

Hannibal bares all

Gary Susman

The whole serial-killer genre has played itself out. It can't pretend anymore to be about probing the nature of evil when it's clearly just about turning cruelty into entertainment. A

few months ago, I wrote in these pages that The Cell, a beautiful technical achievement and a morally bankrupt work of exploitation, marked the nadir of this trend, but I had yet to see Hannibal.

The paradox is that Hannibal is a sequel to 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, the lone film in the genre that coupled its intense goriness with a genuine interest in the moral and psychological effects of its characters' violent acts. Anthony Hopkins's sly performance as flesh-eating genius Hannibal Lecter made unspeakable evil palatable through understated charm. But Hopkins was on screen for only about 25 minutes; the true subject of the film was rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), whose encounters with Lecter helped her confront her own demons and frustrations to become a stronger person and a better agent, not to mention the captor of another fearsome killer and the rescuer of a plucky woman like herself.

In Hannibal, however, Clarice is the supporting character and the gruesome Lecter is front and center. (It's been reported that most of the Silence principals -- director Jonathan Demme, screenwriter Ted Tally, and actors Foster and Scott Glenn -- bowed out because they found Thomas Harris's latest Lecter novel just too revolting.) Hopkins's Lecter struts through Hannibal's locations (mostly in lovely Florence) making only minimal attempts to disguise himself or hide his appetite for brutality. He's as campy an æsthete as Truman Capote (he even wears a Capote-esque hat). Maybe playing for laughs is Hopkins's way of making the character less objectionable; like Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom, he targets his victims for their bad taste and bad faith, as if he were a black-comic agent of poetic justice.

Clarice, however, has stagnated as a character. Ten years after the events in Silence, her FBI career has hit the glass ceiling; she's made powerful enemies at the Justice Department, notably Paul Krendler (played by Ray Liotta as nasty, churlish clown); and she has no hint of a personal life. (Julianne Moore plays her with steely resolve and painfully earned maturity; Foster is not missed.) The resurfacing of Lecter gives new purpose to her existence. Still, the film cares less about why she risks everything to pursue her old nemesis and re-enter his nightmare world (or about what happens to her as a result) than about what inventive mayhem Lecter will create next. (Co-screenwriter Steven Zaillian won an Oscar for Schindler's List, which found goodness to be more mysterious and interesting than evil -- not so here.)

Complicating matters is the grotesque Mason Verger (a wisely uncredited Gary Oldman), a pedophile left maimed and horribly disfigured by an encounter with Lecter, a Kane-like recluse who uses his immense wealth to try to track and capture Lecter for his own vengeful purpose. (Like Bricktop in last month's Snatch, he aims to feed his enemy to ravenous pigs.) He suborns Krendler, offers a reward to a greedy Florentine detective (Giancarlo Giannini) who's discovered Lecter's true identity, and ultimately dangles Clarice as bait. The result is a messy plot in which everyone is both cat and mouse, and in which there is no one to root for except the upright-but-dull Clarice and the lovable cannibal.

Lecter can't corrupt Clarice, so he degrades her in the climax -- one of the most disgusting, revolting sequences I've ever seen -- by removing her moral agency and making her a passive spectator to his brain-damaging theater of abomination. Maybe this sequence is director Ridley Scott's way of confronting the audience, as he did last year in Gladiator, with its own mind-rotting taste for stunningly gratuitous violence. Maybe it's a Lecter-like statement of perverse artistic integrity; Scott serves up Harris's horrific ending with a brazenness that seems to dare the studio censors or the MPAA to cut it. Maybe it's the capstone to a display of incredible technical skill at depicting gore from the inventively gory director of Alien and Blade Runner. Or it could just be a Troma flick with more bucks and more-realistic special effects, the most cynical and expensive exploitation movie yet made.