Ray Pride

I don't want to know about the novel.

Writer makes a fortune on "Silence of the Lambs," spends ten years coursing the world researching, writing, over-researching a sequel filled with snack facts and ornate erudition smacking of autodidactic compulsion. There's no flight long enough to get Thomas Harris' maniacally compacted prose into my carry-on.

But "Hannibal," "Hannibal" the movie, Ridley Scott's succulent, Epicurean rendition of his madman elegy, that's another story. Loving and hateful, luminously rendered, an examination of what love is forbidden, wrong, impossible; "Hannibal" is great for its contrariness alone.

Quickly made but not shabbily so, Scott's restless sequels leap directly into action, with FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling (snow-pale Julianne Moore) hurtling into a shoot-out. Earning a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the FBI agent who's shot the most people -- the adaptation by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian has good jokes and bad ones -- Starling returns to the loose ends of her most notorious case. Hannibal Lecter is still at large. (As is Anthony Hopkins' way with a ripe line.) The movie -- the culture -- admires the imperviousness of an evil genius. How can he know so much and not want slaughter? "He preferred to eat the rude," a character says, "the free-range rude, he called them." Lecter stands for good manners, linen, a properly blocked hat, music well played, wine in the correct carafe. And his own rectitude: Once contact is reestablished, Lecter challenges Clarice for her "perfect grasp of right and wrong." The continuing duel between the pair is heightened by the interference of Mason Verger, an impossibly rich early victim of Lecter's, played by Gary Oldman under a web of scruffy latex. Lecter is epicene and courtly, arbiter of the refined gesture. The mutilated Verger is swish and decadent; Ray Liotta's FBI superior is a sexist, homophobic boor. Straw men or small fish? Lecter strives for manners in the service of better breeding, or at least the winnowing of the shallow end of the gene pool.

Ordinarily, I see movies with a half dozen other writers at most: This preview was so packed, I had to sit on the floor, surrounded by a congeries of solitaries clustered in the dark in anticipation of substandard cackles at Anthony Hopkins' curdled intonation of desiccated camp dialogue. Gary Oldman's strangled lines evoked weird laughter, but a flashback to Lecter's gay past and Hopkins' remarkably dry yet bizarre delivery of the line "Would-you-like-a-popper?" cooled the room.

Scott knows the plot and lines like these are mostly tricksy rubbish, and with the help of editor Pietro Scalia ("J.F.K."; "Good Will Hunting"), the pace never flags. The story is patently implausible. Operatic is an easy word for it. But what seems a lush farrago of petit guignol is in fact as apt as literary adaptations get. Scott creates a world. Lacking Jonathan Demme's stiff self-righteousness, Scott's brilliant production design in scene after scene belies the moments of freakshow luxe. "Hannibal" is a new edition of "Blade Runner" -- contemporary Europe as ruin and hive. There is a section set in Florence where Giancarlo Giannini, wreathed in cigarette smoke and soft linen suits, face umbered even in sleek blue light, plays a detective who joins in the hunt for Lecter. Scott's Florence is the a remarkable, gorgeous rendering of a contemporary European city, compiling Italy as splendid, elegant squalor: "Blade Runner" is the present.

There is a world and a world of art history at work. For instance, in Clarice's FBI basement office, there are screens tacked with gory evidence, arrayed like the leaves of a Di Vinci Codex. (To lower the level of reference, Clarice also doodles faces on a pad in a style like David Mamet's.) I am grateful just to watch Scott work his ingenious, vivacious eye. But "Hannibal" will be most notorious for the last ten minutes or so, primarily for a scene of baroque, clinical grotesquerie -- vivisection of a living character that duplicates a scene in the novel -- that lacks the ironic heft of the final scene's cold legacy. The last reel is also replete with a Bunuel-like surrealist dollop of foot and Gucci pump fetishism, as well as a woman of alabaster-pallor in only a backless black slip of a cocktail dress, showing a recently scoured and red-stitched collarbone wound, followed an escape to a boat straight out of Jean Vigo's 1934 "L'atalante," against a backdrop random fourth of July fireworks. These knowing nods to the history of surrealism on film will be lost on most audiences, who will measure the film for either want or surplus of grue and gore, yet it marks Scott as the kind of artist who is not content merely to cash the check when Dino De Laurentiis and MGM come calling: He honors the text, however foolish it make be, glorifies the visual arts and revels in creating a surrealist provocation with tens of millions of borrowed dollars.

(2001-02-08)

Also by Ray Pride

SLIPPERY SLOPES
There's always much to dispute with Sundance jury choices, but the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for "Memento" was apt, as was the Dramatic Audience Award for rock opera, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which also earned writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell the Dramatic Directing Award.
(2001-02-01)

SLY CONCEPT
Early reviews have thrashed "The Wedding Planner" for being a straightforward, old-fashioned, almost irony-free romantic comedy. A bad call, I think, as the innocence and earnestness of this tale of two fated lovers who are kept apart by chance has its own charm.
(2001-01-25)

GUY STUFF
Guy Ritchie's speedy, sarcastic, often hilarious follow-up to "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels -- almost a remake, in fact -- glories in gaudy vernacular and crass acts performed by a goombah smorgasbord.
(2001-01-18)

CINE-MAGIC!
Collectors of their near-100 special edition DVDs may not know how much time and effort go into producing them, but the multi-supplemented discs bespeak a rare passion.
(2001-01-18)

KIDS IN TULSA
(2001-01-11)

FIGURE IN THE MIRROR
(2001-01-04)

HUMANE TRAFFIC
(2001-01-04)

THE SEA OF EMOTIONS
(2000-12-21)

DON WAN
(2000-12-14)

SAME RIVER TWICE
(2000-12-07)

GREEK TO ME
(2000-11-30)

STILL LIFE
(2000-11-30)

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