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Hear
Carla Frecerro's review in Real AudioHannibal, directed by Ridley Scott - Review by Carla Freccero
Ok, still, this movie’s not for the feeble-stomached. But it’s not as gross as you might think. And it’s a mysterious and moody love-story where both the serial killer and the final girl survive. Looking for trouble at the movies, for KUSP and the film gang, this is Carla Freccero. Copyright Carla Freccero 2001 |
Now
playing at Crossroads Cinema, the Galaxy 6, Northridge Cinemas, the 41st
Avenue Playhouse, Green Valley Cinemas, Santa Cruz Cinema 9, Scotts Valley
Cinemas, and the Skyview Drive-In, Hannibal is the latest in Ridley Scott’s
two-run love affair with Italy. This time it’s Florence, that city
timelessly rotting in its 15th century splendor. And indeed, he makes
the city look incredibly artificial, as is his wont: remember LA in Blade
Runner and the digitized Rome in Gladiator. With Florence, though,
it’s all done with lighting and “crowd scenes”: the city itself is
already a kind of uncanny mausoleum, with its statues dotting the piazzas
and its museum-like municipal buildings. What is missing is the dirty
hustle and bustle of this eminently tourist-infested town, and that makes
it the perfect stage for the camp morality play that is Thomas Harris’
sequel to Silence of the Lambs. The star-studded group--Scott himself,
De Laurentiis, who produced it, David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, who co-wrote
the screenplay, and the actors: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore,
Gary Oldman, Giancarlo Giannini, Ray Liotta, and Francesca Neri—makes palatable—so
to speak--to mainstream and adult moviegoers what might otherwise be a
film too wacky and gross to tempt them.
And
what fine performances these are: Hopkins is delightful as always,
while Julianne Moore doing her Jodie Foster interpretation outdoes her
predecessor in everything but butchness which, let’s face it, Julianne
Moore could never ever achieve in a million years. Giannini is moody
and desperate as Rinaldo Pazzi, descendant of the illustrious Pazzi family
member who in the Renaissance conspired against the Florentine government
and was disemboweled and hanged from the Medici Palace. Gary Oldman
is, well, unrecognizable as Mason Verger, one-time child molester who peeled
off his own face under the spell of Lecter and now seeks revenge.
There’s
lots of smart stuff going on this movie, and from reading the book, one
would have had a hard time figuring out how to make it work—it’s just so
over-the-top. But the film takes the campiness and makes it sophisticated;
it also takes the relationship between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter
and makes it steamy and romantic. And it even does a nice job with Dante’s
Divine Comedy, although Hopkins’ Italian accent is simply atrocious.
Infernal irony, the principle of punishment that makes Dante’s hell such
a gruesomely vivid place, means that the punishment fits the crime in a
poetic sort of way. In the grove of the suicides, Dante meets Pier
delle Vigne, trapped in a tree. When the branch breaks it bleeds
and Pier talks. Hannibal’s “test” to become superintendent of the
Caponi papal library and art collection--where the scenes are actually
shot--involves giving an oral exposition of this episode of the Inferno,
and he does a brilliant job of linking this episode with portraits of Judas
hanging himself, all the while winking knowingly at the police chief who
is about to make the same mistake. And if Pazzi is Judas then well,
that makes Hannibal Jesus, a joke repeated when he is about to be martyred
by Verger Mason’s swine in the denouement of the film. In this way,
Scott reminds us of cannibalism’s Christian heritage in the sacrificial
consumption of the godhead.