Dir: Jonathan Demme
Author: Thomas Harris
At some point or another, we've all seen that clip of Anthony Hopkins in prison blues leaning up against a Plexiglas wall and informing a rather frightened-looking Jodie Foster what he did with a census taker's liver. But how many of us have sat through the entire movie? Read the book?
Quick fact: Tony's creepy little noise at the end of the liver, fava beans and chianti line was an ad-lib that he was sure Jonathan Demme would cut from the final film.
That'd be Buffalo Bill.
For a moment, let's step away from the movie and turn to the book. Buffalo Bill, or Jame Gumb, is genuinely disturbed in the head. The character is sort of an amalgamation of Ed Gein, Ted Bundy and Gary Heidnik. I say "sort of" because Buffalo Bill does skin his victims, uses a fake wrist cast to knock them out, starves them, and leaves them in a pit... He is not using them sexually. He doesn't even see women any longer, he just sees "it." He's a shell of a man who lost his mother—he never knew his father and she wasn't the best parent... At one point it's revealed that she hated her son. She never even bothered to add the missing "s" to the end of his name on his birth certificate. The point is, Jame Gumb doesn't know who he is and after studying the Death's Head moths he raised, he decided to change himself. To put it more succinctly, Buffalo Bill is one messed up dude.
So Clarice is basically sent to Baltimore as eye candy bait ("Lecter hasn't even seen a woman in years...") has to put up with the crude Dr. Chilton who runs the asylum Lecter is held in, and meets possibly the most patient and understanding man on the planet in Barney (the orderly who takes care of all the creeps on Lecter's row). Chilton is sleazy and annoying and the sudden shock of seeing Dr. Lecter in comparison is like getting slapped. Clarice is not greeted by a slithering monster but a gentleman—standing in the center of his cell with impeccable posture with an almost warm smile and a charming greeting of: "Good morning."
Considered one of Film's "best entrances" and he's not even moving.
We're thrown for a loop. The entire first portion of the film and book goes into great detail on how despicable and depraved Hannibal Lecter is and here stands an affable man—trim, polite, well-spoken... Who the hell is this?
There is an air of oddness about him with the way he speaks—how he mocks Clarice's West Virginian accent and never blinks. Winking doesn't count as a blink, and that's the closest Lecter comes to ever closing his eyelids when he's around Clarice (that's disregarding the moment where he sniffs through the air holes in his Plexiglas cage). He initially doesn't agree to fill out the forms for her, tries to intimidate her by doing a cold-read profile on her as she sits outside his cell and even resorts to calling her "simple."
"Oh, Agent Starling, you think you can dissect me with this blunt little tool?"
On her way out she passes Lecter's neighbor, Multiple Miggs. Earlier he hissed something (I won't repeat on this blog) to her, but as she walks past his bars, he flings his semen at her face—which not only had Clarice wanting to get out of the place faster, but really pisses Dr. Lecter off. Enough to get him to called her back, tell her he'd fill out her papers, and to look up an old patient of his. During the night he convinces Miggs to swallow his own tongue for what he did to Clarice. We never know what he said, but even now I still morbidly want to know what anyone could say to make a man actually try to swallow his own tongue. Dr. Hannibal Lecter cannot allow the rude to live. Miggs was rude. As Clarice all but runs for the end of the hallway, Lecter calls her back and gives her the name Mofet and the strange order to "Look deep within your self."
It's a storage facility. That saves about nine pages and several minutes of film right there.
So Clarice starts finding all these clues to lead to Buffalo Bill and eventually learns that Dr. Lecter knows the man's name. She was warned at the beginning by Jack Crawford not to let Lecter know anything personal about her, but finds herself following the former psychiatrist's rules of quid pro quo when trying to fine tune the profile on Buffalo Bill. He learns about her father's death as she finds out how Buffalo Bill goes about picking his victims.
Meanwhile, Catherine Martin (daughter of Tennessee Senator Ruth Martin) is clubbed over the head with a cast and taken by Buffalo Bill. Now Clarice's mission has a focus: Save the girl.
Which is another film and literary oddity that I find refreshing. The damsel in distress doesn't just sit there whining about her problem—she antagonizes her captor and buys herself some time by kidnapping his dog with some McGuyver-like ingenuity. And our hero is not Dirty Harry. She's 5'3", quiet, and looks like a strong wind could blow her over. She's brainy. She's worked damn hard to get to where she is in the Academy.
This is how I feel when I get on an elevator...
When a ploy to get Lecter to expound on his profile of Buffalo Bill goes south (again, he's not an idiot), the Department of Justice steps in with Chilton's help and is, in my mind, directly responsible for Lecter's escape from custody. Under DA Paul Krendler's orders, Lecter is shipped off to Memphis to speak with Senator Martin face-to-mask in hopes of getting an actual name for Buffalo Bill and they stick him in a giant cage at town hall. He gives a fake name.
"Oh, and Senator, just one more thing. Love your suit."
Losing the Plexiglass was a huge mistake.
Sorta kinda suspended (she'd been removed from the case per Krendler's suggestion to the head of the FBI), Clarice "sneaks" in to speak with Dr. Lecter one last time. She even brings him his drawings.
"People will say we're in love..."
He finally gets the full truth out of her—why she ran away after her father's death... Her ill-attempt at trying to save one of the screaming spring lambs from being slaughtered (in the book she stole a horse—another of the farm animals meant to be slaughtered for meat—and tried to scare all the lambs out of their pen). Because she finally bares her soul to him, Clarice is given the means to find the real Jame Gumb. Just before Chilton can have her dragged out of the building, Lecter passes her the case file through the bars of his cage and runs his finger across her knuckle as she takes it from him.
It's his last brush of humanity before he slips back into the comfort of being a predator... He kills the two cops guarding him and escapes by using the face of one of them to get him into an ambulance.
Thanks to Lecter's notes written on the case file and the conversations he had with her, Clarice is able to find that the real Buffalo Bill is Jame Gumb—living in the home of the first victim's boss with the basement all dug out into a labyrinth of torturous horror. Upon finding Catherine in the pit, Clarice's first priority is to at least maim Gumb so she can get a proper call out, but Catherine has been stuck down there for so long she's had it. Instead of whining, she's shouting: "Get back here you bitch!"
In the end of it all, Clarice ends up killing Jame Gumb and getting reinstated to the FBI in time to complete all tests. The book allows Jame Gumb some dying words as Clarice sits across from him and acknowledges the fact that one of her shots deflated his lung.
"What's it feel like being beautiful?"
Unlike the book, the film doesn't end with Lecter sending Chilton a threatening letter and another strangely civil one sent to Clarice. Instead, he calls Clarice during the graduation party to say he's not going to come after her ("The world's far more interesting with you in it.") ask her to tell him when "the lambs stop screaming," and watches his former tormentor climb out of a plane in Jamaica.
"I'd love to stay and chat, but I'm having an old friend for dinner."
He hangs up the phone and slinks off after Chilton like a cat. The end.
This movie actually has no sex, less blood than most western films I've seen and two of the strongest characters in movie and literary history. One is a woman who is anything but a damsel in distress and the other is an incredibly intelligent man trapped in the body of a seriously violent and dangerous predator.
This movie actually has no sex, less blood than most western films I've seen and two of the strongest characters in movie and literary history. One is a woman who is anything but a damsel in distress and the other is an incredibly intelligent man trapped in the body of a seriously violent and dangerous predator.
So watch it. Rent it, Netflix it, program it the next time you see it listed on AMC, buy it... Whatever. If you don't like scary movies, this isn't one of them. It's a psychological thriller, mystery, and drama. The book is absolutely worth reading because the way Thomas Harris writes dialogue and thought processing is so natural it feels like you are Clarice Starling thinking these things...
Lastly there's cake. Look at that cake. Don't you want some? I do.
Very nice review. And of course you touched on many of the reasons I do so love this book and movie.
ReplyDeleteI am not a huge book fan, I will read here and there, full books, but they must peak my interest completely. I have no problem finishing Silence of the Lambs time and time again.
And one thing of beauty with both the movie and the book, the more you watch it, the more you see. There are so many neat little hidden things, or subtle exchanges, that it often goes unseen until the 5th or so viewing.
I do so look forward to your later reviews. Hopefully they are things I have no yet seen or read. I am always on the look out for new things.