| REVIEW by Desson Howe Washington Post Staff
Writer
February 15, 1991
In "The Silence of the Lambs," Anthony Hopkins looks
like a wine connoisseur as he tilts his head, extends his nostrils
and delicately inhales the scent of visitor Jodie Foster. After
correctly identifying her skin cream, he informs her, "Sometimes
you use L'Air du Temps, but not today."
But this brilliant, demented psychiatrist is not in a restaurant
or a winery. Nor is he smelling FBI agent Foster with heterosexual
interest. He's in prison, behind a maximum-security plastic shield,
for acts of cannibalism. To Hopkins, Foster's fragrance, wafting
through breathing holes in the glass, is the bouquet of a potentially
lovely meal.
This is the kind of character creepiness that Jonathan Demme's gripping
cat-and-mouse thriller indulges in. A smart, restrained entertainment,
it doesn't splash around in blood and hysteria. It doesn't have
to. The menace exists in small places, in Hopkins's eyes, or in
the threat posed by "Buffalo Bill," a serial killer so
named for his signature carving up of victims.
The wave of killings is what brings Foster to Hopkins's lair. Dispatched
by special agent Scott Glenn, the fledgling Fed has come to solicit
the genius-monster for psychological insights. But Foster is dealing
with a predatory intelligence capable of running rings around her.
Her guilelessness, as Glenn tells her, is her only protection.
Normally associated with more eccentric, freewheeling fare, Demme
switches gears successfully from "Something Wild" to something
eerie. With trusty cameraman Tak Fujimoto, he refrains from predictable
stylishness, plasmatic reds and murky shadows. Instead, he gives
"Lambs" a surprisingly bright appearance, so that the
horrors occur, as it were, in broad, natural daylight.
He builds the suspense in sure, strategic steps: The face-to-face
meetings between Foster and Hopkins are nostril-hair close, the
camera cuts rapidly between them. A scene in which Foster searches
through a storage room, which has not been opened in 10 years, is
expertly scaring. Demme also places the gruesome in uncomfortably
strategic spots: At one point, a Buffalo Bill victim, awaiting certain
death at the bottom of a well, discovers a bloodied fingernail stuck
on the rocky wall. The implication is far more horrifying than the
actuality.
Although the Demme-isms are scarce, there are touches only he could
have come up with. A Tom Petty song -- ostensibly on the car radio
of a murder quarry -- is played in its entirety, mainly because,
well, Demme likes the song. At another point, Foster consults a
wonderfully dorky, cross-eyed bug expert.
"You mean, this is like a clue from a real murder case?"
he says. "Coo-wol!"
But Demme's primary focus is the interplay between Foster and Hopkins.
As the eager beaver determined to solve this mystery and who slowly
begins to take charge, Foster carries the right mixture of determination
and vulnerability (which is where the significance of the title
kicks in). Hopkins, meanwhile, plays his part with the kind of frosty,
clipped authority only the British seem capable of pulling off.
"Best thing for him really," says this macabre sociopath
when he hears about the death of a former patient. "His therapy
was going nowhere."
Copyright The Washington Post
|
REVIEW BY ROGER
EBERT / February 14, 1991
REVIEW by Desson Howe Washington Post Staff
Writer
February 15, 1991
A film review by Christopher Walters
|
