Australian Odeon

How

Hannibal? - Michael Wastell

 

Oftentimes just the CV’s of the people involved in a film would seem to indicate

a certain level of quality. But how did a film directed by a twice-Oscar nominated

director, co-scripted by the same writer as Schindler’s List and featuring two

actors with 7 Oscar nominations between them manage to turn out

so poorly?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When The Silence of the Lambs became a box office success ($272 742 922 worldwide gross), a critical and awards smash (the first film to sweep the ‘big five’ Oscar categories since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and a cultural touchstone (no one ever cooked with fava beans quite the same way again), talk of a sequel ebbed and flowed for the remainder of the 1990’s. It was a testament to Hopkins’ performance that after just 18 minutes of screen time, the character of Hannibal Lecter continued to intrigue and terrify audiences who wanted more of the cunning and diabolical cannibal/psychiatrist. While both Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster were also enthusiastic about returning to the characters, the main ingredient missing was source material, as Thomas Harris had yet to pen a follow up to his 1988 novel. Until 1999 with the publication of Hannibal and that is where the first piece of the puzzle falls into place.

 

 

The novel was and remains, to put it mildly, terrible. In the 11 years between Silence and Hannibal, Harris appeared to have completely forgotten what about the characters engrossed and enterained audiences, the titular Hannibal in particular. Behind the plexi-glass of his prison cell, Lecter was still able to be menacing without the threat of physical violence. His was a much more psychological kind of terror, the kind that can’t be protected from by simply running away. With Lecter a free man, he became nothing more than a well versed boogie man, spouting uppity quotations before pouncing on unsuspecting prey. With the publication of the novel came the film adaptation’s first casualty and it was a big one. Jodie Foster’s official reason for declining was scheduling conflicts, however as she said in a later interview;

 

‘The official reason I didn’t do Hannibal is I was doing another movie, Flora Plum [a long-cherished project

that has yet to be shot]. So I get to say, in a nice, dignified way, that I wasn’t available when that movie

was being shot.’

 

Simply reading between the lines, it is obvious that Foster was no fan of the source material or the resulting script by Steve Zaillian and David Mamet. Silence’s director Jonathan Demme also departed the project, but Hopkins remained on board (the impact of his $15 million salary on this decision remains open for speculation). From there the project becomes more mystifying as it managed to attract Ridley Scott as director, who was fresh off the biggest success of his career, Gladiator. Having directed a diverse range of films including Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise and GI: Jane, Scott had proven himself a masterful director of many different genres, so adding psychological thriller to the mix should not have proven difficult, and the film is not badly directed per se, but it’s certainly lacking the energy and skill he had brought to previous films. After Foster turned down the role, a laundry list of actresses in their 30’s were considered as her replacement as Clarice Starling, with the producers eventually choosing Julianne Moore, whose perfomances in Boogie Nights, Short Cuts and End of the Affair showed tremendous range and talent. So with a replacement for Foster, who by no means could be considered a consolation prize, shooting began in 2000.

 

Handsomely shot by John Mathieson and expertly scored by Hans Zimmer, the film succeeds on a techincal level, but it's just nowhere near enough to overcome the deficiences of character and plot. Instead of writing Starling as a strong character, as Ted Tally manged to do with Silence, Zaillian/Mamet simply surround her with atrocious men (most notably Ray Liotta's character Paul Krendler) making her seem better by comparison. Krendler is a typical example of a loathsome character created for the sole purpose of being one of Lecter's victims for whom we won't feel sorry, glad even, that he gets his comeuppence for being nasty to our heroine in the film's most ghastly(and unintentionally hilarious) scene. Known simply as 'the brain scene,' Lecter sedates Krendler in order to remove sections of his brain and cook them and feed them to him. Scott is clearly aiming for shock and horror yet only achieves unintentional laughs as Ray Liotta stumbles through the scene lurching from drowsy mumbling to manic laughter, which may be amongst the side effects of eating ones own brain but still fails to illicit anything more than incredulous chuckling (or is there something deeply wrong with me?). 

 

 

As much of a step down from Silence as the film was, it did manage to be an improvement on the book, most significantly with regards to the ending. It is not clear what Harris was thinking when he wrote the ‘Lecter induces Starling to hallucinate into thinking her father’s bones are alive so she can say goodbye before they run off together as lovers*’ ending (which is absolutely what happens), but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that would be one of the most ridiculous scenes ever put to film, so Zaillian/Mamet wisely abandoned it in favour of the ending where Lecter escapes from Clarice’s handcuffs by chopping off his own hand rather than hers (isn’t he sweet?).

Ultimately the film was a huge financial success, leading to a Hopkins-starring adaptation of Red Dragon, which was a vastly superior film to Hannibal, but still left a feeling of cashing in on a franchise in decline.

 

It is hard not to lay the blame for the poor quality of the film solely at the source material and resulting screenplay, but given the decades of experience between Scott, Zaillian, Mamet, Hopkins and Moore, one of them should have been able to speak up and change the film for the better.

 

 

*Lecter and Starling run off as lovers, not Starling and her father's bones. Though that would probably have made just as much sense.