I need a second perspective. I need someone to watch Silence of the Lambs and tell me that it's good. Because from what I'm seeing, it ain't. It might be that I have a biased view. While I'm watching the blasted movie, I can't stop comparing it to the book. I couldn't stop doing that with Memoirs, either. That might be why I can't enjoy movies that I've already read. Then I think to myself, what about Jurassic Park? And Sphere? Then again, there are very specific reasons why I like those movies so much, despite their lack of detail from the books.
Silence of the Lambs just seems cheesy. It's like they tried to replicate exactly some of the stuff from the book, trying to retain the same jokes, even, and failed to make it interesting in the final product. For example, in the book when Starling meets Chilton for the first time, he tries to push her around and come on to her many times, and she just pushes right back, wittily. He calls her Miss Sterling, emphasizing Miss. She responds, no, it's just Starling with an a. He criticizes the FBI's decision to send her, a girl, to meet Lecter. She says, yes, the Bureau is certainly improving. He asks to show her around Baltimore, she looks away, making him realize bluntly that she finds him distasteful. In the movie, the only time she puts him down is when he realizes she doesn't want him to be there when she talks to Lecter and complains that she should have told him that at the office instead of making him walk down to the cells with her. She smiles and says, "And deprive me of your company?" - good one, Clarice. One of my favorite parts of their ongoing rift is completely omitted from the movie. Later on when she comes back to interrogate Lecter and Chilton is much less willing to let her, in the movie, all he says is, "I'm not a turnkey here, Miss Starling, I don't come running down here at night just to let people in and out." But in the book, he continues, "I had a ticket to Holiday on Ice." And here's the good part, verbatim.
"He realized he'd said a ticket. In that instant Starling saw his life, and he knew it.
She saw his bleak refrigerator, the crumbs on the TV tray where he ate alone, the still piles his things stayed in for months until he moved them - she felt the ache of his whole yellow-smiling Sen-Sen lonesome life- and switchblade-quick she knew not to spare him, not to talk on or look away. She stared into his face, and with the smallest tilt of her head, she gave him her good looks and bored her knowledge in, speared him with it, knowing he couldn't stand for the conversation to go on."
I suppose it's hard to put thoughts like that into movies, unless it's done throughout and established as a device. But you lose so much when you can only see actions. Thoughts must be allowed! If I were to become a director, if I wanted to show someone thinking, by Job, I would do it. Otherwise, you have to make obvious gestures, actions, and camera motions. Like, when Hannibal uses the metal clip from the pen to make a pick for a lock. If we could read his thoughts, we would know that he had seen the pen laying forgotten on his cot. Instead, we get this awful, embarassing zoom in on the pen laying on the bed. It's the kind of thing that would make a slow person light up and go, Ohhhhh! and a somewhat smarter person like me groan. As if now we have this big realization that he's going to use it. A totally unnecessary shot. There are many shots like that in the movie.
I just can't get over the fact that this isn't as good as the book. The characters aren't as engaging, the killer isn't as intense or scary, he's more like a rock queen in the movie than anything else. This isn't good even as a movie. It's too deliberate and stagey. I can't believe it won 5 of its 7 Academy Award nominations. The 5 it won were the important ones, too, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and get this, Best Picture....come on! It beat out Disney's Beauty and the Beast, which, by the way, is the only animated movie to have been nominated for Best Picture. It deserved that award way more than Silence of the Lambs.
Final Note: I'd like to give a shout-out to my main man, Anthony Hopkins. He's the saving grace of this movie. Hannibal the Cannibal...you da man. In just 16 minutes, you created one of the most memorable criminals in movie history, among the likes of Tony Montana, Jules & Vincent, and Jimmy & Tommy all of whom had over an hour each of screen presence in their movies. You deserve to have the record for shortest performance ever to win an Oscar.