The Cannibal
Adam Nayman on Hannibal
“One's eyes adjust to the darkness,” murmurs a henchman thoughtfully in Hannibal. It's as elegant a summation of Ridley Scott's underappreciated 2001 thriller as one could wish for, hinting as it does at the veteran director's adoption of a newly pitch-black sensibility—but not at the expense of his trademark visual (or moral) clarity. Set several years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal is not so much a continuation of the first film as an enlargement of its scope and theme. It transposes its title character (the effortless Anthony Hopkins) and his predations across the Atlantic, in effect placing the cultured European sociopath—a cannibalistic Humbert Humbert!—in his proper social context.
Scott's most obvious masterstroke is replacing Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling with the tougher, more resonant take on the character offered by Julianne Moore, whose freckled countenance betrays more life experience than her Oscar-winning predecessor's fresh face. Older and wearier—but no less adept at tracking seriously crazy serial killers— Starling is both more of a hero and more of a damsel in distress than in The Silence of the Lambs, one of several places where Hannibal goes further than its Oscar-winning source material. To wit: Ted Levine's flesh-reaping tailor has nothing on Gary Oldman's child's-tears-imbibing ghoul (a career best performance for an actor who has never been more chameleonic); Demme's tactful gore is similarly outdone by the exposed-brainpan makeup of Scott's climax, which faithfully reproduces the most controversial passages of Harris' brilliantly rococco novel. (Ray Liotta's scooped-out cranium is truly an image to make you lose your mind!). Incredibly atmospheric (so many shots of Florentian piazzas and churches) and surprisingly fleet despite its 131 minute running time (helped along by snappy performers like Zeljko Ivanek and the invaluable Liotta) Hannibal shows Scott has the chops (literally!) to rank with any and all masters of horror. What's truly scary, though, is the fact that he was just getting warmed up for the 2000s...