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Hannibal
(MGM) Rated R
Release Date - February 9, 2001
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Starring:
Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore,
Francesca Neri, Giancarlo Giannini, Ray Liotta
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Produced by: Dino De Laurentiis, Edward Saxon,
Martha De Laurentiis, Ridley Scott
Written by: David Mamet, Steven Zallian
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I haven't
read the Thomas Harris novel and I have made a point
of not reading the screenplay. A screenplay is not a movie.
A movie is a movie. And in this case, everything I heard about
the novel sounds like the movie they should have made. A story
in which the perfectly moral Clarice Starling ends up in love
with the perfectly immoral Hannibal Lecter is the kind of
black comedy that this film cries out to become. And it makes
more sense than anything that is in Hannibal. Clarice's
world is filled with people who claim to be on the right side
of the law and, theoretically, of morality also. But they
are all immoral and inhumane. Likewise, Hannibal's once-victim,
Mason Verger, was immoral before Lecter fed his face to the
dog and remains, in a universe of moral relativity, a less
clearly moral man than Lecter. Hannibal may kill people and
he may eat people, but the movie reminds us repeatedly that
he has a very specific set of rules by which he lives. In
a world where morality is virtually non-existent, these two,
the moral sadist and the moral masochist make a fascinating,
if highly disturbing, fit.
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