Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 16, 1991 TAG: 9102160461
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"The Silence of the Lambs" is a faithful and stylishly crafted adaptation of Thomas' book about a female FBI cadet and her dangerous alliance with one of the most profoundly frightening killers in fiction.
Director Jonathan Demme seems at first like an unlikely choice to bring this heart-pounding story to the screen. Demme is best-known for quirky comedies such as "Married to the Mob" and "Melvin and Howard." But he brings a keen sense of suspense and a taut feeling of dread to the material. What's more, Demme gets powerhouse performances from his leads.
Jodie Foster, in one of her most assured performances yet, plays FBI trainee Clarice Starling. Clarice is a West Virginia mountain woman with true grit. Her father was a small-town lawman who was murdered when Clarice was a child and she has spent the ensuing years developing emotional scar tissue. Clarice has courage and ambition and intelligence that Foster beautifully communicates in her performance; Foster also has an authentic-sounding Appalachian accent, a treat in a profession that often inflicts the most preposterous approximations of Southern accents on audiences.
Clarice is assigned by her mentor (Scott Glenn) to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who is nicknamed Hannibal the Cannibal for very good reasons. Lecter is a brilliant psychiatrist with monstrous perversions serving time in a maximum security institution for the criminally insane.
Ostensibly, the interview is supposed to be used for a profile of serial killers. But the underlying motive is to get Lecter's insights on a killer-at-large nicknamed "Buffalo Bill."
Anthony Hopkins is spectacularly sinister and beguiling as the manipulative and always dangerous doctor. His crimes are unspeakable but Clarice finds herself admiring his intellect and he seems to respond in kind. A relationship develops between the two as Clarice divulges her innermost secrets in exchange for bits of information that Lecter provides on the identity of Buffalo Bill.
It's a dangerous game staged with maximum suspense by Demme, screenwriter Ted Tally and director of photography Tak Fujimoto. The movie is built on tight close-ups of Foster and Hopkins, who develop their characters through subtle and entirely convincing expressions. It's a particularly impressive bit of acting on Foster's part because we can actually see the courageous Clarice take on gumption and character as the movie unfolds. Hopkins is always eerily lighted and his looming presence is reminiscent of Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now!"
Foster and Hopkins are aided by some good supporting performances - particularly those from Anthony Heald as the obnoxious doctor responsible for Lecter, Brooke Smith as the prisoner of Buffalo Bill and Ted Levine as Bill himself.
Demme does not flinch from the more grisly aspects of the material nor does he set out to exploit them excessively. In the hands of some filmmakers, this would be an unwatchable movie, so repulsive are some of the crimes it depicts. There are certainly some unsettling and gruesome scenes but Demme relies more on character development and mood than the special effects department and he injects some macabre humor.
Compared to the pallid and perfunctory "Sleeping with the Enemy," "The Silence of the Lambs" is a wickedly entertaining thriller with smarts aplenty. `Silence of the Lambs' An Orion picture at Salem Valley 8 (389-0444). Rated R for violence, gruesome content and language; 120 minutes.
by CNB