The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - film review

Clarice Starling is undergoing the rigours of an FBI training course when she is recruited by Jack Crawford, head of the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, to help track down a serial killer.  Nicknamed Buffalo Bill, the killer has already claimed the lives of five women, disposing of their bodies in lakes and rivers after removing their skins.  Crawford hopes to identify the killer through his psychological profile, which he intends to elicit by eavesdropping on conversations between Starling and another psychopath who is being held in an asylum, Dr Hannibal Lecter.  Once a well-regarded psychiatrist, Lecter became notorious for his cannibalistic habits, which involve biting into the faces of his victims like a savage dog.   A man of great intelligence and cunning, Lecter enjoys playing with Starling but offers few tangible clues to the identity of Buffalo Bill.  When the Senator’s daughter is abducted, Crawford authorises Starling to offer Lecter a transfer to a more comfortable state prison if he cooperates in the capture of the killer.  Lecter agrees to help, but on the condition that he can probe Starling on her troubled past...

"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti..."  With these immortal lines Anthony Hopkins supplanted Anthony Perkins as the creepiest horror villain the movies have so far given us and elevated what might have been a run-of-the-mill police procedural thriller to the status of a modern horror classic.  The Silence of the Lambs is a brilliantly executed study in psychotic evil, all the more so for Hopkins’ darkly compelling portrayal of the face-eating nutcase Hannibal Lecter, which combines an urbane charm with a pure demonic nastiness.  This is not Hannibal’s first screen outing - he had already featured in Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), played by Brian Cox - but it is his most memorable, thanks to the manic intensity that Hopkins brings to the part, tastily garnished in a black comedic undertone.

The Silence of the Lambs was both acclaimed and vilified when it was first screened in 1991.  The critics and audiences loved it, one of the few contemporary horror films that stood up well alongside the American horror classics of the previous decade, but it was vehemently condemned by groups representing women and transsexuals, who found the film dangerously offensive.  Although the film does undoubtedly merit censure for its caricatured portrayal of a transsexual as a deranged serial killer (the film’s only weak point), it certainly does not show women in a negative light.  In Clarice Starling, authentically played by Jodie Foster, the film gives us one of cinema’s most convincingly ballsy heroines, a character who not only wins the day through her courage and intellect, but who does so without any of the tedious macho posturing to which her male counterparts are prone.  In a startling and long-overdue inversion of the psycho-thrillers of the past, The Silence of the Lambs shows that not only can women be more courageous, resilient and efficient than the male sex, but also morally superior.  Such positive portrayals of women in thrillers prior to this film are extremely hard to come by, so in this respect it marked something of a watershed, one of the most significant pro-female movies in American cinema.

Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster were both justly rewarded with Oscar wins for their gripping performances in this film.  Although Hopkins is on screen for bearly sixteen minutes, he dominates the film to such an extent that you could swear he was in virtually every scene.  His sequences with Foster provide the film with its most chilling and compelling moments, Lecter’s slow, remorseless dissection of Starling’s persona proving to be every bit as morbidly fascinating and scary as the gruesome fate that awaits Buffalo Bill’s victims.  The film won three other Oscars, in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director and Best screenplay, and Hopkins and Foster also won BAFTAs for their performances.  Masterfully directed by Jonathan Demme and sustained by a taut screenplay adapted from a Thomas Harris novel, The Silence of the Lambs stands as possibly the greatest thriller of the 1990s, although its viscerally gruesome horror content and nerve-wracking denouement may prove to be too much of an ordeal for some...

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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