Hannibal is Repellent Trash; A Fine Documentary About Louisiana Music

The success of Ridley Scott's Hannibal, at least during the first few weeks of release, is inevitable; the original made a mint worldwide and became the first film since One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to cop the top five Oscars: picture, director, actor, actress and adapted screenplay. But its success will be of a mechanical, Pavlovian sort?tickets purchased out of obligation, by people who liked the first movie and hope against hope that they'll find interesting continuing threads in the follow-up. But there are none to be found, and the bulk of Hannibal is so glossily incompetent?revoltingly and needlessly gory, dull, poorly organized and, with one major exception, indifferently acted?that it might prompt retrospective criticism of the original.

And it should. The Silence of the Lambs was a breakthrough of sorts for exploitation horror, just as the original Alien was a breakthrough in 1979. But Alien was a sci-fi fantasy that was mainly about atmosphere, shock and Freudian fears of the body; Silence?for all its preposterous bogeyman-mongering with Anthony Hopkins' effete serial-killing flesh-eater?pretended to be set in the real world. It wrapped its horror fantasy narrative in state-of-the-art police procedural details and jacked up its suspense with finely shaded emotions, conveyed mainly through Jodie Foster's controlled, heartbreaking performance as young FBI agent Clarice Starling, Lecter's pupil and adversary. The film's financial and critical victories made novelist Thomas Harris a household name, confirmed Jodie Foster as a superstar, resurrected and elevated Anthony Hopkins' career and moved director Jonathan Demme, previously known for funky, humanist comedy-dramas like Melvin and Howard, Swing Shift and Something Wild, onto Hollywood's A-list.

But it also opened the door for bad filmmaking habits and worse cultural trends. The wisecracking villain-as-hero, previously confined to teenager-baiting crud like the Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser movies, migrated into big-budget Hollywood productions, and suddenly many major actors wanted to play Lecter-style bad guys: fantasy figures cynically positioned by filmmakers as representatives of real-world fears; bon-mot-dropping comic-book masterminds who fused Ed Gein's savage bloodlust with the diabolical genius of a James Bond baddie. Sickening torture, arrayed onscreen with the elegance of a four-star place setting, became increasingly commonplace in so-called "respectable" movies. John Malkovich's presidential assassin from In the Line of Fire, Kevin Spacey's John Doe in Seven, De Niro's Max Cady in Scorsese's histrionic, childishly sadistic remake of Cape Fear: they all dined on Lecter's leftovers and loved it. (Sometimes the audiences loved it, too.)

Never mind the fact that real serial killers are nearly always idiots, morally and in every other way. Real serial killers very rarely get caught in a cross-country cat-and-mouse duel with the FBI profiler whose partner he ate; real serial killers usually get caught because a neighbor called the cops to report a stench in the garage apartment behind the house, where the killer buried the postman and the Con Ed guy under the floorboards. No matter. Now the gore-and-supervillain sweepstakes has been raised to the point where there's almost nothing else onscreen to hold one's attention. Silence of the Lambs was all about sensation, but it at least pretended to be about other things: feminism, daddy worship, the desire of outsiders to transfigure themselves and become powerful.

The post-Silence serial killer pictures aren't so much directed as art directed?somebody's got to up the ante on serial killer lair design?and for all the screaming and squirming of the villain's assorted victims, you're usually hard pressed to find any authentic human feeling in the storylines. Last year's The Cell, in which Jennifer Lopez's dream researcher entered the mind of a serial killer, consisted of little besides art school tableaus of misery and torture that had only the most tenuous connection to the bad guy's own history and preoccupations. It wasn't a movie, it was an amoral showcase for its designers: a Whitney Biennial of death. I keep thinking about James Ellroy's comment that authors who build their careers writing books about diabolical serial killers are basically cowards; they don't have the intelligence or the guts to face the real roots of evil: poverty, racism, abuse and official corruption, so they tell stories about wraiths instead.

On some level, I think Demme realizes this, which explains why his next two dramatic features after Silence, Philadelphia and Beloved, were so socially conscious, ennobling and steeped in reality. They were acts of atonment for a hit film that was widely criticized as brutal and homophobic, and that brought Grand Guignol butchery into the Hollywood mainstream.

As Hannibal opens, its titular wraith, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is alive and well and living in Florence. It's quite a nice opening, actually: black-and-white credits mimicking the grainy, time-and-date-stamped images from surveillance cameras with fleeting, ghostly appearances by the fava bean expert. Then comes the plot, and it's a snoozer. Clarice Starling?now played by Julianne Moore?is still chipping away at the FBI's phallocentric monolith. She's not making much headway. A drug raid at the beginning of the movie goes bad, not due to poor judgment on her part, but because a sexist DC cop tried to countermand Starling's authority. (I'm still not sure what the shootout between the army of cops and drug dealers was about; mostly, it seemed a transparent attempt to inject action into a self-satisfied black comedy that meanders along, doesn't introduce its villain for nearly half an hour and doesn't let the heroine meet him until the final third. It's also an excuse to blow away some glowering, gun-toting black people, whose lives the filmmaker apparently considers worthless.)

Starling's sexist and homophobic superior, Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), explains that somebody's got to take the fall; Starling's reassignment puts her back in a position to hunt the fugitive Lecter. Somebody else is also hunting the good doctor: Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), a wheelchair-bound industrialist and ex-Lecter patient who fell so deeply under Lecter's spell that he tried to lure him to his apartment for a tryst. The fiend mesmerized Verger into hanging himself and slicing off his own face; just for kicks, Lecter fed to Verger's dog scraps of the master's cheek. Verger lives on a lush estate in suburban DC, dispensing rich-man cliches to his underlings like a skinless Ross Perot. He wants to capture Lecter, bring him home to the States and feed him to a herd of specially trained flesh-eating boars.

It's hard to say which part of the Verger subplot is more appalling. The cripple-queer-freak trifecta of Verger's villainy is pretty bad?not just because it's retro, but also because, unlike a similar character in Unbreakable, he's not permitted to have any truly sympathetic moments. The smug, anticipatory expression on Lecter's face as Verger leads him upstairs in the flashback recreation of the maiming invites us to cheer Lecter's sadism; it also equates homosexuality with an Achilles' heel, and suggests that Verger got what he deserved, for being queer and daring to dream of pulling Lecter down to his level. I almost forgot: he's a pedophile, too. Like a rival crime family member in a Godfather movie, he's supposed to be so disgusting that Lecter seems heroic in comparison.

I didn't buy it; Verger has suffered and Lecter, by all appearances, has not. Am I the only one who finds Verger pitiful, tragic and wholly justified in wanting revenge? He comes off far less sympathetically than Giancarlo Giannini's Inpector Pazzi, a Florence cop who IDs Lecter and plots to turn him in for private reward money to buy his way out of debt and please his socially ambitious young wife (Francesca Neri). You can feel the audience connecting with this man, perhaps because he's the only character in the movie whose worries seem real.

I haven't mentioned much about Starling because it's not really her movie. Moore does the best she can with her cliched material?tough chick against the guys?but she's overshadowed by Lecter and Verger and deprived of the little moments of discovery and doubt that made Foster's performance so riveting. Scott and his screenwriters, David Mamet and Steve Zaillian, are much more interested in Lecter, whose part keeps growing as his author's serial-killer library gains additional volumes.

In Red Dragon, he had a glorified cameo, helping FBI profiler Will Graham catch another serial killer. (The film version of that novel, Manhunter, is still the best film version of Harris' work, with a proper respect for violence and a disgusted awe of evil.) Lecter served more or less the same function in Silence, which enlarged his role and made his relationship with Starling the motor that drove the plot.

Now Lecter is at the center of the movie. He's presented as some kind of cannibal version of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, a man who's entitled to do as he pleases because he's smarter than everyone and has better taste besides. And he's a bore. Hopkins seems bored playing him. He tries to spice things up by throwing in odd Americanisms like "Okey dokey," but that's as inventive as he gets. It's a ride-the-money-train performance?the equivalent of the Stones doing "Satisfaction" as a third encore; he's doing it because it pays well, his collaborators are respectable and the public wants it, not because there's any challenge left in this character. There's no coiled energy in his performance this time, and I don't think it's just because Lecter is walking around free instead of pacing in a cell like a jumpsuited panther. Shorn (mostly) of his strange emotional bond with Starling, he stands revealed as just another wisecracking villain-as-hero. Hannibal, with its marble-slick photography, Florentine locations and casual mentions of Renaissance art, classical music and philosophy, is A Nightmare on Elm Street in pseudointellectual drag.

Framed

Documentarian Robert Mugge started to make a film about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's bus tour through Louisiana, but he wandered off the beaten track and made Rhythm 'n' Bayous, a movie about the roots of the state's gumbo musical mixture. Mugge doesn't really bother to organize his footage around unifying principles or themes; mostly he just interviews veteran musicians and music experts about Louisiana's regional music scene, then lets performances play out in real time.

Despite the shaggy-dog nature of the filmmaking?or perhaps because of it?the film is loads of fun. The lineup of artists includes Buddy Flett (doing "No More Cane on the Brazos" on solo acoustic guitar), Po' Henry and Tookie (doing "Prison Song" on a bridge over the Ouachita River), ambidextrous pianist Henry Gray (smoking on "They Raised the Joint") and blind keyboardist Henry Butler singing the deepest, richest version of "Deep River" you've ever heard.