Hannibal Reheated

Hannibal Rising

(R)

originally published February 14, 2007

Gaspard Ulliel

Let’s hope Hannibal Rising does not start a new page-to-screen trend. Released a mere two months after its hardcover brother, currently sitting at number five on the New York Times Bestseller List, the movie Hannibal Rising, with a script adapted by the novel’s own author, Thomas Harris, is like celluloid CliffsNotes. Why take the time out of your busy schedule to read the book when the exact same story is available in a digestible, abridged version you can finish in two hours? Well, Harris is primarily a novelist. Hannibal Rising marks the first time the Mississippi native has tried his hand at screenwriting, even though all four of his previous novels (Black Sunday, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal) have ben made into movies. While he could do a worse job of bringing the origins of literature’s most delectable cannibal psychiatrist to the big screen, his novel is far superior. The film is barely buoyed by obvious expository exchanges, unclear motivations and jagged transitions. Still, Harris’ promise to reveal what occurrences could be so horrific as to birth the seductive monster that is Hannibal Lecter proves far too mesmeric to neither read nor watch. However, the author paints himself into a difficult dramatic corner. Lecter is not Wolverine, needing an intricate backstory involving Canada to explain his psychopathy, and no origin story he could devise could horrifyingly justify the cannibalism, barbarism and sympathy as well as that which we fans imagine.

As such, it comes as no shock that Lecter was borne of the gruesome Eastern Front, caught between the brutality of the Nazis and the indifference of the Soviets. Witnessing the death of his entire family - his father, his mother, and most scarringly, his baby sister Mischa - killed any humanity that may have existed in the medical/ artistic genius, played in the film by Gaspard Ulliel (a French actor known mainly for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement). The third screen Lecter, Ulliel has a large mandible mask to fill. Anthony Hopkins only needed a little over 16 minutes of Lambs’ screen time to etch himself into the pop cultural collective forever, and Manhunter’s Brian Cox was no creepy slouch either. Ulliel’s main problem is how obviously evil and unappealing he makes Lecter. Hopkins and Cox wooed the audience, turning all who watched them into those lonely women who obsess over and marry incarcerated serial killers. I wouldn’t go near Ulliel’s young medical student. (Resembling Christopher Lambert, with his high forehead and long, sharp nose, as he does, Ulliel would make a better young Connor MacLeod. Now Highlander Rising, that’s a prequel I’d pay to see.)

Maybe Lecter’s descent into less appealing serial killerdom is due more to a change in function than in form. When Harris first debuted Lecter, he may have been imprisoned, but he remained the most dangerous man alive. FBI Agents Will Graham and Clarice Starling may have been actively pursuing the Tooth Fairy and Buffalo Bill, but it was Hannibal Lecter who was hunting them. “If only he were to escape,” I shiveringly thought while reading Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. Yet when Lecter waltzed out into the Tennessee night, I quivered with fear for the last time. Hannibal Lecter has replaced Freddy Krueger as the modern boogeyman America loves to love. Ever since uttering one of cinema’s most delicious, climactic bon mots (“I’m having an old friend for dinner”), he’s become a vigilante anti-hero. In Hannibal and especially Hannibal Rising, Lecter’s victims have taken an increasingly guilty slant. Hannibal Rising’s war criminals, led by Notting Hill’s Rhys Ifans, deserve every distasteful plate of cold revenge on which Lecter serves them. By choosing to focus his last two novels on Hannibal Lecter, as opposed to the mentees whose minds he twists for his ill intentions and sociopathic amusements, Harris has pimped his character out like a franchise whore.

Hannibal Rising director Peter Webber (Girl with a Pearl Earring) only abets in the robbery of Hannibal Lecter’s menace. He ladles the scary sauce on too thick, coating the film in heavy, glutenous scenes that overwhelm any residual tension. The film is an improvement over Hannibal, whose operatic high notes - so effective in print - could not be hit by Ridley Scott, but ranks below both versions of Red Dragon in the Lecter pantheon. Though neither Manhunter (Michael Mann’s artistic vision stands supreme) nor Red Dragon (Brett Ratner’s film isn’t bad; it’s just unnecessary) can even touch the hem of The Silence of the Lambs’ ladyskin robe, both prequels were terrifying. Of course, multiple Oscar-winner Silence was not only the most frightening film of the 1990s, but one of the decade’s most important, ranking up there with Pulp Fiction and Scream. Jonathan Demme’s now classic thriller introduced the world to its most terrifying therapist, a man as comfortable eating you as listening to your pathetic whining. Hannibal Rising producer Dino De Laurentiis has already intimated a future invitation to Lecter’s dinner table. If so, I hope Harris is on the guest list (and Frankie Faison, too). Though Hannibal’s ghastly muscle may be degenerating, so long as his creator is the cause, we are assured a competent degeneration. Freddy Krueger could only dream of dying such a painful, high-quality death.

Drew Wheeler