Review: Ridley Scott's "Hannibal" is not Thomas Harris' "Hannibal," but I wish it was
Movie of the Week #13 has an old friend for dinner
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I wish I could see an actual adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal directed by Ridley Scott.
There is, to be clear, a film by Ridley Scott called Hannibal, nominally based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris, and it goes through many of the plot points from that book as you’d see them laid out in a Wikipedia summary. But Scott’s Hannibal isn’t really an adaptation of Harris’ Hannibal. The overall valence is too different, the edges too far sanded down, the characters too thinned out, the grand guignol spectacle and performative provocations of Harris’ text abandoned in favor of a largely bland and unremarkable police procedural that remembers it’s supposed to be a horror film only in the last 20 minutes. I want to see Scott’s take on the actual book, the one where Hannibal Lecter hangs out in a museum of torture instruments to register “aspects of damnation from the avid faces of the voyeurs” examining the exhibits (p. 171); where Lecter is obsessed with his dead sister Mischa, and scribbles equations in a notebook in a fruitless attempt to find a mathematical proof for time travel so that “no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time” (p. 464); where Mason Verger drinks “martinis made with tears” (p. 428) and is killed with his own pet eel by his bodybuilder sister Margot after she obtains his sperm by sodomizing him with a cattle prod (on Dr. Lecter’s suggestion, of course); where Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling joyfully feast on the sauteed brain of FBI agent Paul Krendler in front of his still-conscious body – “Dr. Lecter found the shine of butter sauce on her lip intensely moving,” we are told, after she takes her first bite (p. 504) – and then proceed to have a torrid, passionate love affair across the globe.
I want, in short, to take a trip to the alternate universe where Ridley Scott made a version of Hannibal that really pissed people off.
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