Cinema
Red Dragon (18, selected cinemas)
Cultured monsters
Mark Steyn
Snobbery with violence' was the formula for the old country-house murder mysteries and it works even more profitably for the Hannibal Lecter franchise, which ups the snobbery and the violence and locates them both in the bad guy. When first we meet him in Red Dragon, he's at the symphony and is offended by a third-rate flautist. When next we meet him, he's hosting a dinner party and serving up a simply marvellous dish no one can quite place. What a pretentious wine bore and opera snot he'd be if he weren't humanised by his serial killing and cannibalism — or so one initially assumes. Usually in this kind of movie, you're alert for that faintly queasy sensation when you feel the audience getting off on the pornography of violence. But in Red Dragon what really turns them on is the pornography of snobbery, of Lecter's exquisite disdain.
Nonetheless, it's pure cheeseburger. A real Hannibal Lecter would turn up his nose at Red Dragon and send it back. I called it a Lecter franchise because that's what it is now, one of those faux-sophisticated fast-food chains like the 'Croissant de Paris'-type joints on station platforms that the traditional British Rail snack bars were all somewhat unconvincingly converted into. Dripping in vinaigrette and coulis and garnished with this and that, it nonetheless feels like a warmed-over doggy-bag. After Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) and Ridley Scott (Hannibal), Brett Ratner can't seem to find anything to add to the recipe.
Red Dragon opens two decades ago, preSilence, with Lecter at large in Baltimore enjoying the good life until a careless assault on an FBI man leaves both of them punctured and lands one of them in jail. Flash forward through the years: the FBI guy is called in as freelance consultant on a new serial-killer case — that of the 'Tooth Fairy' — and he in turn is obliged to look for help from his old nemesis. The killer has a thing for William Blake. Of course. And in Thomas Harris's world cops don't know that kind of stuff but mass murderers do. (Harris's monsters are cultured even unto their appellations — Hannibal Lecter, Francis Dolarhyde — while the good guys have to make do with 'Jack Graham' and 'Will Crawford', or possibly vice-versa.) Anthony Hopkins can do his Hannibal mannerisms in his sleep, assuming he sleeps with his eyes open: the main thing is not to blink, just stare ahead, glazed and unfocused, and then drop an erudite clue for the flatfoot.
Dragon is a remake of the 1986 Manhunter, with Brian Cox excellent as a considerably less rococo Hannibal. But Cox was cannibal when cannibal wasn't cool, and in Manhunter his Lecter is, paradoxically, a bit part. It wasn't until Silence that Thomas Harris appreciated what he'd created, moved Hannibal to centre stage and gave Anthony Hopkins the turn of his life. You can't blame Hollywood for being so ravenous for more that it's prepared to cannibalise Manhunter, but it's a very slight hors d'oeuvre in the Lecter three-course meal and in omphing up Hopkins's role Red Dragon winds up feeling less like a
prequel than a karaoke Silence of the Lambs.
And so Ratner's camera coyly reprises the familiar trip to Hannibal's cell, gliding up the prison corridor as Demme's camera did a decade ago. And Anthony Heald, the old friend Hannibal had for dinner in Silence, is restored to life as the unctuous third-rater who runs the place. And Ralph Fiennes, as the Tooth Fairy, shows us his butt and, even though it's a famous rear which provoked considerable controversy in The End of the Affair, here it evokes only certain of the creepier aspects of Silence's more celebrated sicko, Buffalo Bill. In Fiennes's beautifully sculpted posterior, the series finally hits rock bottom. By now, you feel vaguely that Ratner is more or less inviting you to compare every, character, every moment with its equivalent in Silence, and, once you start doing that, you're bound to be disappointed.
Instead of Jodie Foster, for example, we have Ed Norton representing the FBI. He's a somewhat haggard pretty boy in this movie, fretting about his wife and child far away in Florida. This is standard cop-movie stuff: there's none of the sexual undercurrent there was between Dr Lecter and Agent Starling in Silence and Hannibal. Norton's character is pretty much asexual and so in what should be the film's central relationship you feel mainly an absence. And because Hannibal and the FBI agent don't connect with quite the intensity of previous outings, so too the elegant jailbird has a harder job connecting with what's going on beyond the prison walls. The cleverness of the trick in Silence — that Hannibal was the star even though he was in the wings — doesn't work here. In part, that's because the rest of the story seems to be an hommage to an entirely different movie: Ralph Fiennes is Norman Bates with a harelip, rattling around some old pile haunted by the ghost of his abusive grandmother. The casting of Fiennes is the movie's biggest mistake: he's supposed to be a hideously disfigured misfit festering in isolation, but, of course, he's just hunky handsome Ralph with a stick-on harelip. The best bits of the Fiennes mess are when Emily Watson, moon-faced, saucer-eyed and blind, is coming on to him on the couch of his mausoleum. It's a reminder that we see the descent of man into monster most clearly through his relationship with the fairer sex, and thus underlines the unsatisfying nature of the Hopkins/Norton double-act.
How sad to find oneself lapsing into Lecter-like ennui. I had cause recently to read the interview transcripts of two teenage killers — moronic thugs of no particular distinction, but, as with many murderers no matter how stupid, utterly narcissistic. It was Harris's inspiration to yoke the narcissism to a killer who could live up to it. The problem with Red Dragon is that the narcissism of Hannibal Lecter has now infected the entire project.
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