By Iloz Zoc
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste...
If you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste... — The Rolling Stones
How does one give sympathy to the devil? That's the challenge Thomas Harris faced when writing his background story on the birth of one of the most riveting fictional human monsters, Hannibal Lecter.
Of course, the first question to ask is why do it? Giving tea and sympathy to a consummately evil character that sends shivers down your spine with just that look and just that smile is quite an accomplishment. Why ruin it? When the Borg where humanized in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the franchise lost a perfectly frightening bunch of monsters with no redeeming social values, and future stories lacked the visceral fear of being assimilated without remorse, of losing all that you hold dear in the wink of an eye and there was nothing you could do about it. Bad call there.Thomas Harris made a bad call here, too. Not only does he try to explain why Hannibal is a cannibal, but he chooses to do it prosaically. His characters speak with flowery-mouth intensity appropriate for literature, not screen dialog. And for a laconic character that's short on words but long on cuisine, that's not a good thing; a known unknown evil is more worrisome and scary than a known known evil, definitely.
Director Peter Webber also makes a bad call by ponderously posing every scene with self-conscious importance. This slows the pacing throughout the movie, and scenes of visceral intensity, where Hannibal begins to succumb to his guilt and insanity, are held back because of it. And don't get me started on those James A. Michener-styled background tableaux. With near-risible martial arts aunt, offerings to ancestral samurai, and a poorly thought through revelatory exposition that is capped by Hannibal crying "You ate my sister!" I imagine lots of popcorn bounced off theater screens everywhere as audiences chuckled and shifted uneasily in their seats — for all the wrong reasons.
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