A film review by Christopher Walters

The impact of The Silence of the Lambs went beyond its amazingly charmed life at the box office. For months on end the film percolated through casual conversation, and popped up all over the mass media to enjoy a vigorous afterlife, soon to be extended by its release on home video.

The Silence of the Lambs is one of those rare hits that resonates so well with the timbre of the times it can't help turning into a social fact. The first two parts of The Godfather were the last movies to do so while insisting on a similarly bleak theme. "All good things come to those who wait," as Dr. Hannibal Lecter says; Silence is less safe and more disturbing than Coppola's gangster epic. What Demme does with the story created by novelist Thomas Harris (whose generic prose effects aren't up to the challenge of his own ideas) amounts to ceative alchemy, as he seizes every opportunity to make the narrative yield its treasures. Demme moves his narrative forward with images of isolated people in a society gone mad with desperation and grief. This is why The Silence of the Lambs connects so broadly, and cuts so deep.

A serial killer's missing soul opens a window onto an abyss where sex is permanently confused with murder, and it scares the living hell out of most people, as abysses will. There have been a lot of movies and television programs about serial killers, most of them forgettable because they spend their energy on crime genre conventions and leave the primal anxieties untapped. Demme, however, turns on the spigot with a vengeance. He's the first director of talent to see that serial killing is inseparable from the idea of social isolation. Here, he gives us the images of an America where comunities appear only in their official guises, and families exist only as fragments. With the possible exception of Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and her roommate (there's the barest hint of a same-sex romance), there are no couples, happy or otherwise, in this movie, only people who speak to each other across gulfs of loneliness or engage in reationships based on power dynamics.


Demme illustrates these things in sharp, vivid strokes. Clarise is on an FBI training course in the opening scene, pulling herself up a steep hill with a rope. It soon comes out that she was orphaned by violence, and her life ever since has been a struggle for solid ground. And as the movie progresses, Demme pulls us as far as he can into her sense of displacement. When she arrives for her first interview with Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) as the search for serial killer Buffalo Bill begins, she looks like a J. Crew model entering a medieval dungeon; and when she and her FBI supevisor Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) go to West Virginia to examine a victim's remains, he abandons her to a roomful of uniformed sherriff's deputies, towering over her. Both Lecter's unsavory keeper and a nerdish museum bug expert refuse to take her seriously from the outset, hitting her up for dates instead.

Most powerful of all are the unflinchingly intimate close-ups of Foster during her conversations with Hannibal Lecter. As he expertly lays bare the defining traumas of her life, Clarice's face becomes a map of her insecurities, and the darkness around her is charged with tension and significance.

Foster has never been better, and the good joke Hopkins puts across is in the way his Hannibal Lecter relishes the theatrical possibilities of being a celebrated monster. At once a carnivorous reptile and a brilliant artist-scientist, Lecter embodies evolutionary extremes. He fascinates everyone who comes into contact with him, and he knows it. His silent mentor, if you will, is Marlon Brando's Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, whose declaration that we must become friends with moral terror now seems fairly prescient in this context.


Lecter is flexing old psychiatric muscles when he leads Clarise into her own heart of darkness, but only at first, for he is increasingly motivated by genuine affection for her plight. Their relationship is as perversely touching as can be, and their scenes together generate more electricity than a hundred ordinary screen romances. The moment when Lecter's index finger brushes Clarice's--their only physical contact--is indelible, and just to make sure we get the point Demme rhymes it with a shot of Jack Crawford's prosaic hardshake at the movie's end, when he tells Clarise that her induction into the FBI would have made her father proud. As a surrogate father for Clarise, Crawford is both much safer and less valuable to her than Hannibal Lecter, who tells her, "The world is more interesting with you in it"--and what sweeter compliment could an emancipated woman hope to receive these days?

Demme ends the film on a lovely grace note: a lingering overhead shot of Lecter disappearing into the teeming street life of a Carribean island village. It's an ambiguous echo of a thousand Hollywood endings, and it's a shame so many see it as a setup for a sequel. Because it's really another displacement, this time back to a common past when people couldn't afford to live in isolation. Demme invites us to look at them eddy to and fro, and wonder where we went wrong.

REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT / February 14, 1991

REVIEW by Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer
February 15, 1991

A film review by Christopher Walters