Review: Michael Mann's "Manhunter" is evocative, sensual, and unforgettable
Movie of the Week #5 dives into the earliest Hannibal Lecter film
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Even with a few high-profile misfires in the mix, there are exceptionally few fictional characters of the last half-century who have been treated as well on film as Hannibal Lecter. It is pointless to compare works as toweringly great as Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and the NBC Hannibal series created by Brian Fuller (2013-2015). They are each masterpieces in their own right, and all so distinct from one another in their approach to the material that I would never want to try ranking them, or picking a favorite. Virtually every character in the Thomas Harris oeuvre has had multiple compelling interpretations, and not only does each adaptation hone in on different themes and ideas from Harris’ work, they all innovate film language to highly unique ends to get there, from Demme’s use of direct-to-camera address in Silence of the Lambs to the crash-course in a century of global avant-garde cinema that fuels Fuller’s Hannibal. Books can, have, and should be written about each of these works; they are all singular and indelible in their own right, and in the ‘true crime’ era we’re currently living (suffering?) through, these three adaptations stand particularly tall and apart from the pack as uniquely smart and thought-provoking versions of the serial killer narrative.
I say all this at the outset to establish that whatever gushing I am about to do for Michael Mann’s Manhunter is not at the expense of the other adaptations. And I establish that boundary for myself as much as for the reader, because Manhunter is such an amazing, all-consuming cinematic experience that it prompts critical hyperbole; I have to remind myself that as much as Mann’s interpretation speaks to me, Silence of the Lambs is also among the greatest films ever made, and Hannibal is one of the 10 best TV shows of the last 25 years. What is particularly fascinating to me about Manhunter is its status as the first adaptation of Thomas Harris’ world – and therefore the one most unencumbered by Hannibal Lecter’s later pop culture dominance – and as a foundational work for Michael Mann, who is one of my very favorite filmmakers, and who bends this material so entirely to his own will that it is as central to his body of work as any other film he has made. I will not say Manhunter is a more ‘evocative’ work than the other Hannibal masterpieces; Silence of the Lambs is more ‘evocative’ of the subjectivity of woman in masculinized spaces, of course, and one of the great cinematic texts on the subject; NBC’s Hannibal is more horrifying and challenging, and more ‘evocative’ of dreams, psychosis, and sexuality. But Manhunter is ‘evocative’ in ways only Michael Mann films are ‘evocative,’ of spaces and feelings, of mood and atmosphere. If Fuller’s Hannibal is sexual, Mann’s film is sensual, concerned with touch and texture and color, telling its story primarily through the sensations of the world the characters inhabit. Watching Manhunter, it is easy to forget there are other Thomas Harris adaptations, or other movies at all, so all-encompassing is the world Mann constructs.
The key to Mann’s take on Harris’ Red Dragon (a fantastic novel that’s very much worth reading, in part because, despite being turned into two different films and a TV show, it’s never been fully adapted faithfully) is how he blends very matter-of-fact, grounded procedural elements with vivid moments of emotional subjectivity. Mann pays so much attention to little mundane details – note how we watch Graham punch out full phone numbers in his hotel room, with the kind of awkward, halting quality an actual person entering half-remembered phone numbers after an exhausting day of emotionally draining criminal profiling would – and the production design is rarely heightened or theatrical. Lecter’s1 cell is a stark white space, cramped, sterile, and emotionless, a far cry from the cavernous dungeon Anthony Hopkins inhabits in The Silence of the Lambs; the FBI offices are just normal, lived-in office buildings; Graham’s hotel room isn’t romanticized or glammed up (except, perhaps, in Mann’s dramatic blue lighting when his wife Molly visits), and Will tells his son about how his encounter with Hannibal Lecter led to a stint in a mental hospital in the cereal isle of a grocery store, with recognizable brands stretching across the frame. There are striking visual spaces, of course, like the darkroom where the FBI examines the Tooth Fairy’s note for fingerprints, or the film lab with its ominous revolving door where Francis Dolarhyde meets Reba, but the film firmly feels like it is taking place in our reality; just as the Tooth Fairy invades suburban households, the horror literally enters the most mundane of spaces.
All of which makes the film’s bursts of sensual subjectivity stand out all the more starkly: Those moments where we see into Will’s interiority, like his dream sequence on the plane, or when Mann chooses to overwhelm us with mood, like the early striking shots of the beach where Graham lives (or, perhaps, has escaped) with his family, the reds of the sunset breaking over the water hitting us with eerie intensity. Both The Silence of the Lambs and NBC’s Hannibal are extremely heightened and theatrical in different ways – Demme’s film has a sort of Brechtian quality to the way it stages conversations in confrontational, straight-on close-ups, and the show is essentially avant-garde, taking place not in reality but in a land of dreams and psychosexual interiors – but Mann’s is rooted in our world, and even its most atmospheric or sensual flourishes naturally grow out of that conceit. What makes the film’s most memorable shots so indelible – images like that early shot of Jack and Molly framed against the deep red sunset piercing through the otherwise dark house, or Will saying “it’s just you and me now, sport” while looking at his reflection in a rainy window while lights flash around him – is how they are rooted in the sensation of being a living, feeling body in a palpable, lived-in world. Demme consciously chose to remove the bars from Lecter’s cell and have a sheet of glass separating him and Clarice instead, so nothing would come between the camera and their faces; Mann not only shoots through the prison bars, but frames both Will and Hannibal in between them for the entirety of their conversation, continually reinforcing the way both men are, in their own way, trapped.
This grounded, immediate approach is key to Brian Cox’s performance, too, which is a far cry from the larger-than-life figures embodied by Anthony Hopkins or Mads Mikkelsen. Those versions of Hannibal are men out of myths or dreams, people who come down to our realm from a different world or plane of existence; Cox’s Hannibal is smaller, plainer, and less charismatic, a horrifying but still real person, like an actual serial killer one might see profiled on the news. I won’t play the “which Hannibal is best” game, but I will say this: despite (or perhaps because of) Cox having only three scenes to embody the character, the straightforwardness with which he plays it makes his Lecter, to me at least, the scariest and most unsettling of them all.
After all, this is the only adaptation of Harris’ stories made before Hannibal Lecter became an outsized cultural icon, and therefore the only adaptation true to Harris’ first book in how minimal his presence was at the outset. I’m not sure Hopkins actually has that much more screen time in The Silence of the Lambs than Cox does here, but the structure of that story and of Demme’s film makes him a more obvious center of gravity (Hopkins didn’t win the Best Actor Oscar for nothing). Manhunter is the only Hannibal Lecter film that isn’t really a Hannibal Lecter film at all, and if you’re a fan of the book Red Dragon – which I very much am – it makes the film really refreshing to revisit now. Even if it makes certain adaptation choices I wouldn’t have made (we’ll get to those in a bit), and even as I also love the NBC show’s take on the novel in its final set of episodes, there is something about Manhunter that feels true to the intention, scope, and tone of that novel, something we won’t see in later Harris adaptations as Hannibal Lecter’s gravitational pull steadily expands.
On a scripting level, Dolarhyde’s character gets a bit shortchanged in comparison to the book – it is definitely where Mann makes the biggest cuts from Harris’ text – but Tom Noonan is outstanding in the part, and Mann is able to communicate the central ideas from the Dolarhyde chapters purely through his sensory-focused filmmaking. Mann is particularly well-equipped to do the Tiger scene, one of the oddest and most touching events in Harris’ book, situated right on the edge of the real and the ethereal. The sequence is graphic and tactile, all about touch and contact, but there is also a constant dissonance at play; it is set in a sterile medical office, but the tone (thanks in part to the musical score) is slightly otherworldly; there is a tiger in the room, but it is sedate, a wild beast turned into a gentle giant. The word ‘sensual’ again comes to mind, and that continues to be key in how Mann develops Dolarhyde and Reba’s relationship in the scenes that follow, and how he gives us access to Dolarhyde’s tortured interiority.
The way Mann’s film treats sex plays on a similar intersection of violence and pleasure as the NBC show, but where that series is so profoundly Freudian – not to mention intensely queer and homoerotic – in its approach to sexuality, Manhunter cues in on the way Dolarhyde is childlike in his understanding of sexuality, a voyeur who watches but is uncomfortable with actual touch. Look at the long scene with Dolarhyde and Reba in bed, scored to Shriekback’s “This Big Hush,” as he puts his ear to her chest to listen to her heartbeat, and then covers his mouth with her hand before silently weeping. It is an incredibly potent bit of filmmaking, deeply uncomfortable given the nature of the man doing the touching, but also weirdly poignant. From the tiger sequence through to this moment, Mann does what is essentially half the book in just a handful of scenes, relying on film language and performance to sell the idea narrated to us in the book that Dolarhyde almostfinds a way out of his murderous compulsions, and in fact almost does so the same way Will Graham found a way out of his own compulsion to empathize with murderers: by making a real human connection, skin to skin and body to body, instead of looking at photos and videos of people they admire or seek to understand.
Here too is a benefit of Manhunter coming before Hannibal Lecter’s cultural ascension: Where later adaptations (including the NBC show) focus on the mirroring of Graham and Lecter, Mann’s film is all about the inverse duality of the Tooth Fairy and the FBI agent profiling him. Graham and Dolarhyde are doubled in all sorts of ways over the course of the film, not only in moments where Graham literally attempts to think like the killer, but in their shared habits of studying photos and videos, their tendencies towards voyeurism, and their inability to hold on to a real, healthy human relationship. That last point is diluted a bit in the film compared to the book, as Mann’s adaptation misses the final punch that both Graham and Dolarhyde lose their chance at a normal life through their encounter; it is heavily implied in Red Dragon that Graham’s family is broken at the end, and that he will not, in fact, return to that idyllic life on the beach.
That said, Mann also sharpens a linkage between protagonist and antagonist that does not exist in Harris’ text, in that by simplifying the ending to a single confrontation at Dolarhyde’s home, he puts Will directly in the position of stalker and killer for the climax. In the book, Dolarhyde comes to Will, faking his death before attacking Graham and his family at their home in Florida; here, Will comes to Dolarhyde, finding himself unable to resist the magnetic pull of potentially saving a life, or maybe of just coming face-to-face with this man who fascinates him. Although Graham’s intentions are nobler and his actions sanctioned by the law, he too becomes the killer; ultimately unable to just play voyeur from a distance, he, like Dolarhyde, must come into contact with the subject of his gaze, and, again like the Tooth Fairy, he must destroy it. Mann even makes it clear that Graham’s intervention is unnecessary twice over: First through the many FBI agents backing up Graham, with an additional SWAT team on their way; and second, by pointedly showing Dolarhyde unable to go through with killing Reba, whose immediate danger is Graham’s nominal excuse for breaking ranks and going in alone. Francis Dolarhyde would have been taken down whether or not Will Graham leapt through the window, or even if Graham had stayed back in his hotel room; that he chooses to put himself in the line of fire, and taking the killing shot, is a pointed and provocative alteration in Mann’s adaptation.
This is why Will’s happy ending on the beach with his family feels so discordant to the rest of the film. Even ignoring that the Will Graham of Harris’ novel loses his family despite displaying much less recklessness, Mann’s film on its own terms is not constructed to show Will playing the hero, but taking Dolarhyde’s place as killer in one final attack from the woods on an unsuspecting home; he becomes, to some extent, what Hannibal tells him he is earlier in the film.
“Did you really feel depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbes to death? l think you probably did. But it wasn't the act that got to you. Didn't you feel so bad, because killing him felt so good? And why shouldn't it feel good? lt must feel good to God. He does it all the time.”
Manhunter ultimately lacks a full reckoning with these implications; it ends with Will welcomed back to his family, who are all shaken, but happy to be reunited. The director’s cut adds a scene where Graham visits the next family the Tooth Fairy was planning to kill, to see the people he saved, but the sequence feels unsure of what exactly it wants to say, suspended between maudlin and morbid; Mann was right to cut it for the theatrical release, alongside most of the other scenes included in this largely unnecessary revised version. In either edit, although the reunion on the beach scored to Red 7’s “Heartbeat” is evocative and satisfying on an aesthetic dimension, it feels like something is missing, like Mann had pushed things to a point where a more provocative dénouement was necessary.
Here is an area where the NBC show does notably have a leg up, in that its final episode wholeheartedly embraces the need to pay off on Will’s inability to pry himself away from serial killers. It changes the ending to one where Will and Hannibal consummate their series-long flirtation through an extremely bloody climax, graphically murdering Dolarhyde together, bathing in his blood in the moonlight (a callback to one of Lecter’s lines in the book, repeated in Mann’s film, about how blood looks black under the moon), passionately locking lips and making out,2 and finally committing a murder-suicide as Will pulls them both over the edge of a cliff. The sequence absolutely feels like the ultimate climactic expression of all of Harris’ stories put together, a mad theatrical gestalt of the violence, sex, and self-destruction undergirding all Hannibal Lecter tales (unlike many fans, I am not eagerly awaiting a mythical fourth season of Hannibal – Fuller and company got the ending exactly right the first time). Mann doesn’t stick that landing; Will needs to end this story broken, in some way, for crossing the boundary, and instead he returns to his starting point. Mann is not a director known for pulling his punches – his earlier masterpiece Thief ends on a perfectly dark and damning note, the airport finale in Heat is rightly legendary, and Miami Vice has one of my favorite bittersweet endings of all time – but for whatever reason, Manhunter doesn’t follow through, and it is the film’s only notable weakness.
That should not take anything away from the construction of the climactic confrontation itself, though, particularly since Mann’s use of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” is an all-time great needle drop, one worthy of several essays in its own right. The moment Dolarhyde puts that record on the turntable to drown out Reba’s ability to hear him is where Manhunter fully diverges from the world of Thomas Harris and gives itself over to the world of Michael Mann, who is the only cinematic storyteller who would construct this scene this way, around this specific – and specifically weird – song. “Gadda-Da-Vida” is, famously, a 17-minute track that took up the entire second side of the album it debuted on; it has its easily hummable central melody, but for most of its runtime is devoted to an extended jam session passing between the players. In most cinematic uses of the song, one would expect to only hear that recognizable melody, the short ‘single edit’ of the track that played on the radio. Mann is instead interested in it because of its duration, because of much it morphs and evolves from its more conventional starting point; writing that sentence, I realize why Francis Dolarhyde, the ‘Red Dragon’ who kills to achieve his ‘Becoming,’ would be attracted to it, too.
Mann allows the scene to transform alongside the peaks and valleys of the song; its slow, ethereal middle section with the mournful organ riff – which doesn’t sound far off from Manhunter’s outstanding original score by Michel Rubini and The Reds – plays as Will sneaks through the forest outside Dolarhyde’s house, gradually getting further and further from the safety of the other FBI agents; s the jam begins to build back up, Will sees Dolarhyde preparing to strike, and begins his rush towards the window; when he leaps through and shatters the glass, the main melody and lyrics return in full force; and as the song reaches its insane fever pitch, so does the scene build to a chaotic climax. The images of Dolarhyde shooting at the officers outside is constructed through disorienting jump cuts and step printing, an editorial logic rooted synesthetically in the dissonance of the music.
On a narrative level, this is a vastly simplified ending compared to what Harris wrote in Red Dragon: Graham and the FBI get Dolarhyde’s address, they approach the house, there’s a shootout, and Dolarhyde is killed. In the raw plot summary, it pales in comparison to the twistier climax of the novel. But even as I feel Manhunter miss some key character context in its incongruously happy closing scene, the climax is so stylistically animated and self-assured, thanks in no small part to Mann’s expert use of the needle drop, that it serves as a great example of why the way a story is told is more important than the specifics of the story itself. That’s true of every great Hannibal Lecter adaptation, I think, each of them first and foremost a towering achievement of form, from which every other compelling quality flows. Again, I won’t say which one is my favorite; we are ridiculously spoiled that a movie as great as Manhunter cannot, thanks to the greatness of its subsequent peers, claim to be ‘definitive.’
NEXT WEEK: We take a look at a very different 80s movie, with Brian De Palma’s controversial classic
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For unknown reasons, Mann’s film changes the spelling of Hannibal’s last name from Lecter to Lecktor, and the Tooth Fairy’s name from Dolarhyde to Dollarhyde. For the sake of simplicity, I’m just using Harris’ original spellings, which are how the characters’ names are written in all other media.
Okay, the show does not actually have Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy kiss in this scene – it is instead an extremely erotic embrace – but I think most Hannibal fans will agree with me in saying that the scene is so clearly a body-to-body consummation that in one’s memory, the kiss emerges whether or not it was photographed.