The Silence of the Lambs

#17 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

It’s amazing how this film just fires on all cylinders for its entire runtime, from its quiet opening to its grand finale. It’s kind of structured a bit weird, it’s all kinds of trashy, but it’s so impeccably made that it completely and easily overcomes all of that to become a real thrill ride of an experience. That it won Best Picture is some kind of miracle because the Academy had been awarding largely safe films for more than a decade, and The Silence of the Lambs represents something far less safe and somewhat outside of their standard awarded fare: quality genre filmmaking.

Buffalo Bill (Tim Levine) has killed five women in the Midwest and MidAtlantic region of the US, and the FBI is getting nowhere with its investigation. So, it decides to establish a psychological profile of the man they have no idea who he is by interviewing serial killers they have in custody, including the notorious Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector (Anthony Hopkins). The problem is that Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) is the man who caught Lector, so he sends the trainee Clarice Starling (Jodi Foster) in his place. It’s a multi-faceted move, including the obvious edge of sending an attractive, seemingly frail young woman to beg for help from the man behind the glass who hasn’t seen a woman in eight years.

One of the most curious and effective elements of the film’s construction is how immensely subjective it’s filmed. The most obvious is the use of closeups where actors are looking directly into camera to create this eerie feeling in the audience that they’re being watched. This usually happens in conversations with Starling where she doesn’t do it, like in the first conversation with Crawford in his office, but she does stare into the camera for some of her conversations with Lector. It also extends into all of her experiences in the investigation, from a fellow inmate throwing…intimate substances into her face to the West Virginia sheriffs and deputies all towering over her, we see the whole thing from her perspective, and that perspective is kind of terrifying. She’s physically unimposing, weaker than most people around her, and she has to stand toe to toe with people like Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald), the warden of the prison who obviously wants to bed Clarice, as well as one of the most notorious serial killers in US history.

The meat of the film is this psychological dance between Lector and Starling as they try to use each other for their own ends. Starling needs his insight into Bill, quickly learned to be much more since he end up having had a direct connection with him in his life before he was caught. Since she’s the only person he’ll talk to, but only under the condition that she reveal himself to her, Crawford allows her to go back repeatedly as the investigation continues, Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), the daughter of Tennessee’s junior senator, gets kidnapped by Bill, and things turn increasingly desperate.

What’s kind of weird about the film is that balance between the conversation with Lector and the investigation around Bill. The connective tissue between them is Clarice herself, and it’s mostly a literal, mechanical connection since she ends up performing the final leg of the investigation herself. There’s supposedly a connective tissue that’s more thematic and character based in the story behind the film’s title, her getting over a traumatic event from her childhood when, orphaned, she moved to Montana at 10 and ran away when she heard the slaughtering and crying of lambs at the farm. She’s haunted by the sound of their crying which will supposedly get addressed when she deals with the missing Martin girl, but it’s a tenuous connection that the film never really addresses. I only bring this up because the film works despite this instead of because of it. It works because it so firmly dedicates itself to the stylish telling of the two sides of the story, interweaving them expertly to build a cohesive experience overall.

And that experience is all about that tension as the action and stakes ramp up with Miller getting her hand’s on Bill’s dog, Crawford leading a SWAT team into the wrong house, and Clarice asking some follow up questions that takes her to Bill’s house, all right after Lector violently got himself out of prison. I also have to give the film real props for setting things up in a way for Clarice to go to Bill’s house and have the extra information that would make her visit different from any potential previous visits from local police (the information about the moths). It’s not hyped up or propped up, but it’s there, enough to do what is necessary.

It’s really remarkable how well this film works, how it seemingly brings everything together (I really don’t think the actual connection for Clarice between Lector and Bill works, but the film is so busy entertaining around that point that it doesn’t really matter, almost like the source material was kind of trashy). I thought, more than once, of Robert Redford’s Out of Africa, another kind of trashy story given prestige treatment, and I wondered why I felt like it worked here and not previously. I think the difference is that the prestige treatment for the silly romance in Out of Africa tried to remake the story into something that it wasn’t naturally (a grand romance), while all the money and talent thrown into The Silence of the Lambs makes it the this pristinely made trashy thriller.

Performances are great all around. The whole film rests on Foster’s shoulders, and she carries herself pretty much perfectly, balancing fear, confidence, and self-doubt all at once. The flash is Hopkins as Lector, and he’s great, getting into Clarice’s head with just little twists of words, and his presence looms large on the whole film.

It’s a great entertainment, completely embracing its depths of the worst imaginings of the human condition while telling a compelling mystery and delivering the thrills.

Rating: 4/4