In THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), a young, idealistic FBI trainee sent in to consult on a case with Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant but diabolical therapist who's been caged for eight years. Clarice's quarry is a mystery slayer tagged with the nickname "Buffalo Bill," because the victims all plus-sized women turn up partially skinned. Lecter won't cooperate with the veteran FBI agents on using his Sherlock Holmes-like powers (and some insider info) on figuring out Buffalo Bill's whereabouts. But Clarice appeals to the deadly doctor, who feeds the young woman vital clues in trade for personal details about the wounds in her own past. Talk to Your Kids About ...Families can talk about the heroine Clarise Starling, whose plight is actually the core of the film's drama and humanity (Hannibal Lecter just steals every scene and subplot he's in). She's an ambitious but vulnerable orphan, a young woman trying to persevere in an often- grisly career fighting the worst kind of crime, in an environment dominated by men -- even the "normal" ones are pretty creepy. Why do you think Clarice fascinates Lecter so much? We come upon Lecter, along with Clarice, as he stands ramrod straight with his impassive black stare and thin smile, as still as a reptile in his tight-fitting prison fatigues. It’s a measure of the film’s horribly potent entertainment value that we take this preposterous situation seriously as a toughly realist, almost procedural thriller, and genuflect to Lecter’s fantastically preposterous intellectual attainments, making Woolworth’s-style pencil sketches of Clarice, cuddling a lamb. With her sharp-faced intensity, Jodie Foster is outstanding as Clarice, the brilliant young operative who once made her mark as a student questioning the bureau’s civil-rights record in the Hoover era, it seems, and for her pains got an A-minus from her buzzard-like boss, Jack Crawford, played by Scott Glenn. Crawford is one of the many older men with an ambiguous, apparently romantic interest in Clarice. These include creepy Dr Frederick Chilton – played by Anthony Heald as hardly less weird than any of the imprisoned killers under his care – and of course Lecter himself. Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Lecter is an uproarious technical masterpiece. All his stage work and accumulated Shakespearian savvy had been leading to this moment. The high-impact closeups on his face that director Jonathan Demme creates are moments of climactic confrontation, intercut with closeups on Clarice, and they land like crashes of timpani. His Dr Lecter whimsically declares that he will help Clarice, but only in exchange for being allowed to psychoanalyse her, listen to her most intimate fears and memories and … what? Exorcise them? Violate them? Then it turns out that Buffalo Bill’s most recent prisoner-victim, Catherine (Brooke Smith), is the daughter of a US senator, Ruth Martin (Diane Baker) – a brilliant narrative contrivance which means that Lecter’s expertise is now such that he must be treated as a kind of VIP prisoner and transported to Memphis, facilitating the use of those extraordinary restraints and masks.  Cell mates … Clarice confronts the monstrous Dr Lecter. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Orion Pictures But how exactly does he reach Chilton’s carelessly unguarded pen, extract the inner nib, keep it in his mouth until such time as he can use it to unlock handcuffs – which themselves would appear to have a very serious design flaw? Well, these feats give Lecter an almost supernatural edge on his enemies. For me, the strangest moment is when Senator Martin makes her TV broadcast statement to Buffalo Bill, repeatedly using Catherine’s name and using old photos of her as a child, in an attempt to make him see her as a human being. It’s a psychologically sophisticated approach that onlookers call “smart”. And yet the awful, unemphasised point is that it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are no scenes in which Buffalo Bill is shown ignoring her on the TV, or coldly or irritably snapping the TV off. He just never sees this broadcast and the utter failure of this “smart” appeal is never remarked on. There is a grisly pessimism in this. After 26 years, The Silence of the Lambs holds up terrifically well; what emerge stronger than ever are Clarice’s flashback memories of her cop dad. Like Spielberg’s Jaws, this movie evolves the style of Roger Corman, who is given a cameo, although if this was being made today, the writers might be a bit charier of venturing into trans issues with the egregious Buffalo Bill, and the misjudged condescension of Clarice saying that trans people are generally “very passive”. The bizarre autopsy scene is still horribly unnerving, with the participants putting a powder menthol smudge under their noses to stop the smell freaking them out, and the roll-film camera doing its periodic snap and uncanny, keening whine. And then of course there is the relationship of Hannibal and Clarice. He is the villain, and yet not the villain; he is her mentor, her undeclared lover, her opponent. The open-ended nature of his destiny sadly left things open for a disappointing franchise series, when Hannibal’s final phone call and psycho-Pimpernel disappearance before the closing credits was the perfect way to end it. It has bite. Hannibal Lecter yêu ai?Một trong những điều thú vị nhất trong The Silence of the Lambs có thể nói đếnchính là mối quan hệ giữa Hannibal Lecter và Clarice Starling. Sự im lặng của bầy cừu có ý nghĩa gì?"Sự im lặng của bầy cừu" là là cụm từ thường được sử dụng như một phép ẩn dụ để mô tả tình huống các cá nhân đồng loạt giữ im lặng trước sự bất công hoặc hành vi gây tổn hại cho người khác. |
