Director: Jonathan Demme
Cast: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine
Have I Seen it Before: One doesn’t start a Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins) podcasts without coming across this one at some point in their past.
Did I Like It: Can a review of this film over thirty years after its release add anything new to the discourse about it? Probably not, aside from the need to say that whatever you remember about the film, it’s better than that memory feebly maintains.
It’s such a singular cinematic experience that our episode of Friendibals did kinda, sorta descend into an effuse-fest.
And I’m actually okay with that! The movie is that good, and stands far and ahead above any other attempt to bring the character to life, with the exception of—against all odds—the tv series Hannibal.
But after that bloom of rediscovering the film withers even slightly (it’s been several days since I screened the movie and recorded the episode), are their complaints that I can reach for?
A reflexive criticism I could see is that it, at the most basic level, implies some very not-nice things about transgender people. The film doesn’t do nearly enough (or at least as much as Thomas Harris’ novel) to make explicit that Jame Gumb’s (Levine) is a monster who thinks he is a transgender, not that trans people are akin to monsters.
That all might be forgiven, and a degree of nuance is on display here, if only the film weren’t so good that it isn’t just an extremely good way to spend two hours, but that it singlehandedly re-defined the serial killer genre through the present. We could (and I, inevitably, will) talk about the glut of Hannibal Lecter sequels and prequels we got in result to the film’s ubiquity*, but nearly every serial killer movie in the last thirty years. Just look at Instinct (1999), a movie I was only 50% certain I was remembering correctly before looking it up. Any film featuring crime of any sort absorbed the sounds, but not the language of this film. Just look at Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994). There’s a mean-spirited, at best, but ultimately hatefully violent myopic discourse regarding the trans community now, and while it would be exceptionally reductive to blame that all on this film, every stunted attempt by filmmakers to give their monsters more dimension for three decades might very well have done so.
If only the film weren’t so good.
*Another thing I forgot during the podcast: In the book and in Ted Tally’s screenplay, the iconic muzzle placed on Lecter was written as a hockey mask. One could imagine why that didn’t survive to the final cut.