Red Dragon

Red Dragon, the second version of Thomas Harris' first Hannibal Lecter novel, stars Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar playing Lecter in Lambs and repeated the role in the sequel, Hannibal. The film is an exceptionally well-produced, well-acted project that, for a number of reasons, should never have been made.

For starters, there's already a movie of the book: Manhunter, Michael Mann's 1986 film. While its MTV-styled theatrics are dated, it's quite a good movie?analytical, cold, slightly abstract, with obvious respect for the psychic toll inflicted on victims' relatives, and on the cops who must live with these sorts of cases. Brian Cox played Lecter in that film, and while he was onscreen only a few minutes, offering advice to FBI serial-killer expert Will Graham (William L. Petersen), I still prefer Cox's performance to Anthony Hopkins'. Where Hopkins played Lecter as a half-repulsive, half-charming horror movie monster, swishing the lines around in his mouth like Chianti and spitting them into Jodie Foster's face, Cox's version was subtler, icier, more human-scaled. In his interaction with Graham, you got the sense that the doctor was very good at entrapping innocent people and murdering them, but not so good at functioning in society. Subsequent Lecter movies ask us to be amused by the doctor's utter absence of pity and remorse?to chortle along with Lecter at all the inferior morons who dare challenge his godlike bloodlust. Manhunter sees the doctor's lack of pity and remorse as the thing that makes him defective?a much more mature, intelligent viewpoint, one that challenges the audience instead of pandering to it.

Red Dragon is a bigger, glossier and (oddly enough) much warmer version of the novel, with a cast of topnotch actors and behind-the-scenes talent. In every scene, you can sense the actors and filmmakers straining to make the movie intelligent, humane, defensible?a reaction against the stark commercial realities of Red Dragon's existence. Shepherded into production by producer Dino De Laurentiis, who produced Manhunter, it's what I call a money train movie?the kind of project that pulls into the Hollywood train station loaded with fat sacks of cash, making every top-shelf actor and filmmaker in Hollywood feel as though they'd be an idiot not to hop aboard and get some. The passenger manifest of the Red Dragon Express includes blockbuster director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour), Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally, composer Danny Elfman and ace cinematographer Dante Spinotti, who shot many of Michael Mann's projects, including Manhunter. (If the movie were made 30 years ago, Edith Head would have designed the clothes.)

The cast includes, by my count, at least five Oscar nominees or winners. Besides Hopkins there's Edward Norton as Agent Graham, Mary-Louise Parker as his wife, Harvey Keitel as Graham's commanding officer, Bill Duke as a PD boss, Silence costar Anthony Heald as the unctuous chief of Lecter's sanitarium and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sleazy tabloid columnist. (It's a stereotypical scummy fat loser part, the kind of thing Hoffman's long since grown beyond, so I hope the actor was handsomely paid; it's disturbing that audiences cheer his character's murder, but I can't say I blame them.) Frankie Faison, the only actor to appear in all four Lecter films, has a bit part as an orderly. Norton is the standout, enfolding a now familiar character?the FBI profiler who's emotionally damaged by his work?with an exhausted integrity. The warm moments with Graham's wife and kid ring true, and each scene he plays opposite Hopkins suggests a job interview, as well it should.

Unsurprisingly, third-time cannibal Hopkins gives the film's least interesting, least modulated performance?a lip-smacking, "Where's my check?" star turn. He actually seems to be metamorphosing into a ham; with each turn as Lecter, his face gets pinker and fleshier, his smug sneer more piglike. Ralph Fiennes nearly redeems the movie as Francis Dolarhyde, the lonely, harelipped, mommy-abused, family-murdering photo lab employee Lecter and Graham join forces to catch. Emily Watson (a smart performer who's a tad actressy here) plays the blind colleague with whom Dolarhyde becomes smitten. As in the book and the original film, this relationship echoes the Frankenstein pictures, combining the episodes with the little girl and the blind hermit. It was easier to swallow in Manhunter, where Dolarhyde was played by the gifted actor-screenwriter Tom Noonan, a skinny giant with a stammering soft voice, a high-domed forehead and a Boris Karloff childlike aura. Fiennes is a blond god who's obviously been spending a lot of time at the gym (you would, too, if you had to do as many nude scenes as Fiennes does here). With such a pretty actor in the role, the cleft palate scar on Dolarhyde's upper lip doesn't make the character look freakish; it makes him seem soulful. Yet Fiennes still communicates Dolarhyde's unending emotional turmoil. (When confronted by two contradictory urges?say, the desire to seduce or destroy his girlfriend?Fiennes' eyes squeeze shut so hard that Dolarhyde seems to be in physical pain.)

Despite the best efforts of Fiennes and the filmmakers, however, Dolarhyde remains a bogeyman; the film even dusts off the original climax of the novel, which was a cliche when Michael Mann rejected it in 1986?the climax that's not really a climax because the killer is still out there (cue scary violins). The disturbing thing about serial killer movies isn't their near-pornographic levels of violence, torture and fear, but the fact that audiences have become used to them and feel let down without them. (Jonathan Demme, a supposedly gentle filmmaker who found his way onto the A-list by directing Lambs, deserves much of the credit for bringing slasher film cruelty into the mainstream; Ratner acknowledges his influence by copying Lambs' photography, compositions and sets.) Since serial killers, unlike werewolves or vampires, are real, the serial-killer movie genre strikes me as a pretty despicable recent development in movies, because it deliberately conflates Hollywood nonsense and real horror. This kind of picture may be drawn from our tabloid-inspired nightmares?drawn, in a roundabout way, from reality?but the genre doesn't analyze and transform our fears; it falsifies and neuters them, making them fantastic and comic. (An image from the early 2001 release Hannibal showed Lecter on an FBI "Most Wanted" website, sharing space with Osama bin Laden.)

In Red Dragon, Lecter compares Graham's ability to recreate mass murders in his head to a form of "artistic imagination"?a term that applies to movie serial killers, not real ones. Real serial killers aren't demented geniuses with high-tech dungeons in their basements who get caught because they kidnapped a senator's daughter or murdered a snooping reporter. Real serial killers are moral and emotional cripples who get caught because they came home drunk after a killing spree and accidentally dropped a victim's thumb on mommy's welcome mat, where the paper boy could find it. The genre's ritualized lies have ceased to be disturbing; now they're as familiar as the sight of Monument Valley in a western. The character of Lecter is a flesh-eating forensic psychiatrist, but these movies are comfort food.