Amazon.com Essentials:
Based on Thomas Harris's novel, this terrifying film by Jonathan Demme
really only contains a couple of genuinely shocking moments (one involving an
autopsy, the other a prison break). The rest of the film is a
splatter-free visual and psychological descent into the hell of madness, redeemed astonishingly by an unlikely connection between a monster and a haunted
young woman. Anthony Hopkins is extraordinary as the cannibalistic psychiatrist
Dr. Hannibal Lecter, virtually entombed in a subterranean prison for the
criminally insane. At the behest of the FBI, agent-in-training Clarice
Starling (Jodie Foster) approaches Lecter, requesting his insights into the
identity and methods of a serial killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). In
exchange, Lecter demands the right to penetrate Starling's most painful
memories, creating a bizarre but palpable intimacy that liberates them both
under separate but equally horrific circumstances. Demme, a filmmaker with
a uniquely populist vision (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild),
also spent his early years making pulp for Roger Corman (Caged
Heat), and he hasn't forgotten the significance of tone, atmosphere, and the unsettling nature of a crudely effective close-up. Much of the film, in fact, consists of actors staring straight into the camera (usually from Clarice's point of view), making every bridge between one set of eyes to another seem terribly dangerous. --Tom Keogh
