Ridley Scott's "Hannibal" is a carnival geek show elevated in the direction of art. It never quite gets there, but it tries with every fiber of its craft to redeem its pulp origins, and we must give it credit for the courage of its depravity; if it proves nothing else, it proves that if a man cutting off his face and feeding it to his dogs doesn't get the NC-17 rating for violence, nothing ever will.
The film lacks the focus and brilliance of "The Silence of the Lambs" for a number of reasons, but most clearly because it misplaces the reason why we liked Hannibal Lecter so much. He was, in the 1991 classic, a good man to the degree that his nature allowed him to be. He was hard-wired as a cannibal and mass murderer, true, but that was his nature, not his fault, and in his relationship with the heroine, FBI trainee Clarice Starling, he was civil and even kind. He did the best he could. I remember sitting in a restaurant with Anthony Hopkins as a waitress said, "You're Hannibal Lecter, aren't you? I wish my husband was more like you." Hopkins returns here as Lecter, although Jodie Foster has been replaced by Julianne Moore as Clarice. We do not miss Foster so much as we miss her character; this Clarice is drier, more cynical, more closed off than the young idealist we met 10 years ago. A decade of law enforcement has taken the bloom off her rose. She is credited, indeed, by the Guinness Book of Records as having killed more people than any other female FBI agent, although like all cops in movies she still doesn't know what to say when her boss demands her badge and her gun. (Suggestion: "I ordered the D.C. police to stand down, and they opened fire anyway.") Exiled to a desk job, she soon finds herself invited back to the chase by Lecter himself, who writes her from Florence, Italy, where he is now a wealthy art curator. On his trail is another millionaire, Mason Verger, who wants revenge. Verger was a child molester assigned to Dr. Lecter for therapy, which Lecter supplied by drugging him and suggesting he cut off his face and feed it, as mentioned, to the dogs. Now horribly disfigured, with no eyelids or lips, he remembers: "It seemed like a good idea at the time." (Verger is played with repellent ooze by an uncredited and unrecognizable star; search the end credits.) A Florence detective named Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini) suspects that the curator is actually Hannibal Lecter, and decides to shop him to Verger for a $3 million reward. This turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea, he realizes, as he ends up spilling his guts for Lecter. Giannini has always had sad eyes, never sadder than in his big scene here.
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