When it was announced that Ridley Scott would direct Hannibal (2001), a decade after Jonathan Demme’s revered adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and a mere two years after Thomas Harris’s novel of the same name came out, industry pundits and audiences alike were skeptical. Anthony Hopkins was set to return in the titular role, but his co-star, Jodie Foster, was not despite winning an Oscar for her portrayal of Clarice Starling in Demme’s film. Instead, she was replaced with Julianne Moore, who was a respectable choice, even though her casting spelled trouble for an erratic, immediately controversial sequel that many thought wouldn’t even make it to screen.
Ridley Scott’s big screen adaptation of Harris’s Hannibal was based on a script co-adapted with Steven Zallian and the playwright David Mamet, who largely retained the narrative beats and eccentricities of Harris’s source material, for better or worse. Where Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs pushed the expectations of violence for an Oscar favorite, Scott’s Hannibal was an outright tongue-in-cheek gore show that explicitly portrayed Ray Liotta chewing his character’s own cooked brains. While the film pre-dated the torture porn craze that began with Saw in 2004, it was decidedly more grand guignol than most slasher films from the previous decade, such as Scream (1996) and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
If anything, Hannibal feels like Euro Horror. That’s not just because the film begins in Florence, but because, like the book it’s based on, Hannibal has both an inherent patience and romance at its core. Where The Silence of the Lambs was a propulsive serial killer thriller with Hannibal as an ancillary, albeit memorable character, Hannibal is a languidly paced, often very violent, romance. Hannibal and Clarice aren’t conventional partners and neither Harris nor Scott portray them as lovers, yet there’s a longing between them. While Scott piles on the gore and pushes the limits of good taste in this near-100 million dollar budget major studio tentpole sequel, the last act reveals that our two leads, having saved each other, are working within a much more old-fashioned framework: that of a love story.
Hannibal screens this evening, February 11, at IFC Center on 35mm as part of the series “Hannibal x Hannibal Lecter: A Life.” Author Brian Raftery will be in attendance for a Q&A on the occasion of his new book Hannibal Lecter: A Life being released.
