Sloppy seconds

During the opening credits to Hannibal, director Ridley Scott’s long-awaited follow-up to The Silence of the Lambs, a piece of music plays: it’s the "Aria" to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, performed by Glenn Gould. But this is not the earlier, more spry version recorded by Gould in his youth; it’s the later, longer version, recorded in his 40s: tentative, hesistant, full of stops and starts signifying an older, more meditative mind at work.

That’s about as close as Hannibal ever gets to subtlety, or the sublime. Though its Florence locations are remarkable, this is not a piece of Renaissance art. Mostly, this is a beautifully-photographed, very expensive gross-out movie, one that substitutes the grotesque for the chilling at every turn.

As most people by now know, Hannibal also features some of the most stomach-turning dining scenes ever captured on film. If the Mad Cow scare doesn’t turn you into an instant vegetarian, the last half hour of Hannibal surely will.

The story picks up 10 years after FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling (played by Oscar winner Jodie Foster in the original, now played by Julianne Moore) has parted ways with cannibal gourmand Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Sir Anthony Hopkins). After botching a drug raid, Starling is given one chance to save her FBI career: follow up the trail of Lecter, who is also being sought by one Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), a wheelchair-bound freak who was once persuaded by Lecter, under hypnosis, to cut his own face off and feed it to his dogs. (If this doesn’t kill your appetite, the man-eating Sardinian pigs probably will, and if not that … then, well, there’s always dinner in the last half hour.) As played by Moore, Clarice Starling is no longer wide-eyed and vulnerable, the very qualities that made her earlier dance with Lecter fascinating. Instead, Moore plays her as tough, very handy with a gun, and sporting a twangier Southern accent than before. Unfortunately, she never comes off as vulnerable throughout Hannibal: she seems like someone who can take care of herself.

Lecter, on the other hand, remains an enigma: Hopkins brings an even more laid-back, twisted charm to his role as the psychiatrist who just happens to enjoy eating people. If anything, the freedom to pace around Florence, exacting his revenge at will, makes Lecter a more interesting character to watch. Hopkins seems to relish the role once again, albeit seasoned with a bit more ham this time.

But despite a script-doctored ending (by David Mamet and Schindler’s List screenwriter Steve Zaillian), director Ridley Scott cannot escape the book’s fatal flaws. The first half builds up nicely, as Lecter slowly unveils a revenge scheme among the beautiful piazzas of Florence. Scott’s cinematography in Italy, Sardinia and the lush green fields of North Carolina is quite stunning: but again, it’s just artistic wrapping for a rather basic grand guignol concept. (The Grand Guignol of Montmartre, Paris, was a 19th-century theater that specialized in blood-filled dramas and bouts of gore.) Hannibal’s story drips with excess, but it’s just sound and fury signifying nothing.

Gone is the sense of dread, terror and fear found in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs. Instead, Scott serves up the macabre in large doses. He fills the cast with grotesques (like the swinish Sardinian pig farmers, Ray Liotta’s Paul Krendler and Oldman’s gruesome Verger) in hopes that the audience won’t object too much when these people are brutally dispatched. Of course, who wouldn’t prefer the company of the much more urbane Lecter, who, despite being a vicious psychopath," can’t stand rudeness"?

On a side note, I find it interesting that many British actors are making a career out of playing American grostesques. Oldman’s facially-challenged Verger (along with his role as the creepy conservative senator in The Contender) reminds that he is best when burying himself in character. He transcends mere caricature of evil, throwing in the occasional "Wow!" or clucking his tongue nastily. Hopkins also plays an American psycho (as did Englishman Christian Bale in the film of the same name), and I can’t help feeling it’s the Brits getting back at Hollywood for all the villainous Limey characters of late.

I admit, part of me enjoyed Hannibal – the part that likes a good revenge scenario. And revenge, we know, is best served cold. But why does it feel as though Ridley Scott was trying to salvage a mediocre sequel by resorting to a bloodbath ending, to at least get people talking? That seems cold, indeed.