***This movie is rated R*** Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead!
As I sat in Starbucks with a chocolate chip cookie and a chai tea telling my friends to shut up while waiting for the movie to load on Amazon I realized that there is no better Hannibal Lecter than the one played by Anthony Hopkins (seriously, he was the best part of the movie). In Director Brett Ratner and writer Ted Tally’s installment of Thomas Harris’s bestselling novel “Red Dragon,” (2002) the only scenes that truly stood out, as groundbreaking in the sense of acting, were the ones with Anthony Hopkins. Rotten Tomatoes critics gave it a rather positive rating of 69%. The budget was $78 million and it grossed $209.1 million in the box offices.
The movie overall wasn’t a bad one. There were themes of gore (Hannibal is a “gourmet” Cannibal after all), there was some graphic violence and even a small amount of romance between Ralph Fiennes’ serial killer character Francis Dolarhyde (known as the Tooth Fairy) and Emily Watson’s character Reba who is blind. This is where it gets interesting. Normally I would say that Ralph Fiennes is one amazing actor, from the way he can mold himself into the character to the way he delivers the lines with ease. I have seen some other of Fiennes films, e.g. Maid in Manhattan, The Harry Potter Movies and Schindler’s List among others and this one was definitely not his best. He sounded like he was mumbling the entirety of the movie and ran around his house in a failed attempt to look panicked to see if his (severely blind) girlfriend had found his diary that was locked in a fireproof safe. Spoiler, she didn’t. Perhaps his mumbling was because of Fiennes slight failed attempt at an American accent, or maybe it was the what the director had in mind for the character. The world may never know.
The film begins normal enough with renowned psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) watching an orchestra rendition of “Midsummer’s Night Dream.” He is very obviously ticked off by the way one particular flutist is playing. Cut to the following scene back at his house, he is hosting the orchestra for dinner, when some of the members begin commenting on how the flutist has been missing. The camera then pans to Lecter (who has a really nice ponytail going on) pouring someone a glass of wine and smirking quite viciously (I hope that you dear reader understand what is happening right now, because if not you are in for a great big treat). Hopkins’ performance throughout the entirety of this movie is phenomenal but his performance in “The Silence of the Lambs” is groundbreaking and one of the best performances by him in my opinion. His performance sucks you in and makes you want to continue watching the movie, despite other mediocre performances. He plays the part of Hannibal Lecter so perfectly to the point where it gives you the chills every time he appears on the screen.
After dinner, a guest by the name of FBI Special Agent Will Graham (Edward Norton) e.g., Fight Club shows up to talk with Lecter, who just so happens to be his psychiatrist. After Lecter leaves the room to grab Will’s coat, Will gets curious and looks through a big book to find the page bookmarked on something about sweetbreads, he then has a revelation which is slightly confusing until the occurrence of the next sequence of events. Norton gave an ok performance in this scene and throughout the entire movie I had never heard of him or seen any of his performances before watching this movie. Overall, it could’ve been better, especially when he gets attacked and stabbed by Lecter after he looks through the book, he just flops over and doesn’t really look like a man who had just been stabbed. Somehow he manages to roll over (he got stabbed deeply in the stomach multiple times with a large knife) and grab this arrow that he had been admiring beforehand. He then manages to stab Lecter and by some means proceeds to grab his gun from quite a distance (for a stabbed person to reach) on the ground and shoot Lecter, multiple times at that. At bit further down the road in the movie, we get to the scenes with tabloid reporter Freddy Lounds (Philip Seymour-Hoffman), who was ultimately the reason Graham retired from the FBI. Seymour-Hoffman is another actor that I greatly admire, e.g, The Hunger Games, The Big Lebowski, Boogie Nights, Almost Famous…etc) but this role was just not for him. To sum it up he was very bleak and seemed confused in an oddly fake way. Fast forwarding to the end of the movie after Graham’s wife Molly (Mary-Louise Parker) and their son Josh (Tyler-Patrick Jones) get attacked by Francis Dolarhyde, Molly shoots him dead and goes over to comfort her bleeding husband instead of her traumatized son. I thought this was kind of strange because she barely even acknowledged that the kid was crying and slightly injured. Personally, the ending is the best part of the movie. The director of the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane; Frederick Chilton (Anthony Heald) comes down to Lecter’s cell to tell him about “a young woman from the FBI waiting to see him.” Lecter then turns around and asks curiously of her name which sets up the story for the next installment “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991).
What I thought was especially interesting about the movie was how the film crew decided to do the opening sequence of credits. They play around with different camera shots such as close ups and extreme close ups. The credits roll through with newspaper clips in the background glued into some kind of book, essentially telling the story of what happened after Will Graham was stabbed. The fact that the newspaper clippings are in this book foreshadows towards the end of the movie (spoiler) that the book is, in fact, Francis Dolarhyde’s diary. The camera does extreme close-ups whenever an important character’s face is shown and the music, playing softly in the beginning crescendos when a shocking relegation is revealed. The music continues with a switch between high violin notes being played and then softer lower violin notes. The credits go on with the same sequence of high violin notes and some lower violin notes. It then begins to wind down with another full orchestra crescendo and lots of violins playing. As the music winds down the newspaper clippings flip through quickly and the camera cuts to the next scene.
In sum, the storyline was really well thought out, it flowed nicely and kept my interest. The acting in part by Anthony Hopkins was astounding, but by other members of the cast was rather bleak which is why I give this movie 3.5/5 stars.
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