What the Nominees Were: Beauty and the Beast, Bugsy, JFK, The Prince of Tides, The Silence of the Lambs
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Richard Linklater’s Slacker is an indie masterpiece, but hardly the sort of movie that would have been considered.
What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Silence of the Lambs
How Hard Was the Decision: Not really hard, because this is generally regarded as one of the best movies ever made. The only thing that affected the decision was that the movie’s intense transphobia has not aged well at all. But ultimately, the movie is so well made outside of that that I’ll reluctantly give it a pass.
How Hard Was the Decision: Not really hard, because this is generally regarded as one of the best movies ever made. The only thing that affected the decision was that the movie’s intense transphobia has not aged well at all. But ultimately, the movie is so well made outside of that that I’ll reluctantly give it a pass.
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
Stars: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine
Writer: Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
Stars: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine
The Story: Ambitious FBI trainee Clarice Starling is asked by her boss to interview the infamous serial killer Hannibal Lecter, in hopes that he can help them catch a new killer nick-named “Buffalo Bill”. Lecter detects that Clarice is ashamed of her rural past, so he insists on psycho-analyzing her in return for his help. Forced to tell Lecter everything, Clarice confronts her own past, which helps her track down and kill Bill, but Lecter escapes in the process.
Any Other Nominations or Wins: This became the first film since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to win the big five: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Adapted Screenplay. It lost Editing and Sound.
How It Won: It’s still really bizarre that this movie was recognized by the Academy, which doesn’t generally like serial-killer horror-thrillers, to put it mildly. It was just so damn good (whereas the only real Oscar-bait-y movie that year, JFK, was too controversial)
How It Won: It’s still really bizarre that this movie was recognized by the Academy, which doesn’t generally like serial-killer horror-thrillers, to put it mildly. It was just so damn good (whereas the only real Oscar-bait-y movie that year, JFK, was too controversial)
Why It Won:
- In the DVD extras, Hopkins arrogantly says that no American actor could have played Lecter, because Americans are trained to make their characters organic and understandable, whereas British actors are willing to create characters externally, concerned more with the audience’s psychology than their own. His Lecter is essentially an inhuman devil: we’re not getting inside his head, he’s getting in ours. Crucially, Lecter remains three-dimensional and believable, because (novelist) Harris, (screenwriter) Tally, and (actor) Hopkins have given him a clear (albeit demonic) internal logic, but he’s not a character that you would arrive at by putting yourself in this situation, or even by reading the literature on typical serial killers. This story doesn’t “write itself”, because Lecter is an entirely original creation.
- The DVD includes not only deleted scenes, but every line deleted from the remaining scenes, which is highly instructive when it comes to trimming movies down and keeping things moving. The editor is constantly snipping off the ending lines that would have provided a little “button” for each scene…But of course life is a lot more unpredictable and dangerous when things get unbuttoned. The finished movie is exactly two hours, which was obviously the producer-mandated length. If Demme hadn’t gone through and ruthlessly cut out every slack line and scene, it would have been 2:20, the standard length for today’s flabby, lifeless blockbusters.
- Especially instructive are the two cut scenes that were obviously intended to provide a “launch into act three”. After Lecter escapes, the angry director of the FBI (played by Demme’s old mentor, Roger Corman) calls our heroes into his office where he summarily fires Crawford and kicks Clarice out of the Academy. As they leave (pictured below) Clarice says to Crawford that she’s now sure that the killer must be in Ohio, and she’s going to go there and find him, save the day, and get them their jobs back. These scenes were still in the movie for the early test screenings, but William Goldman (Princess Bride, Misery) attended one of those screenings and implored Demme to cut them, so Demme chopped them out and never looked back, which helps the movie immeasurably. We still feel that it’s all up to her now, but without her having to say that out loud, which was dreadful.
- Demme always intended to shoot flashback footage of actual lambs to intercut with Clarice’s title-inspiring monologue, after first shooting the footage of Foster delivering it. It is both to his credit and Foster’s that he realized he had struck gold with her performance and couldn’t cut away.
- Clarice’s first interview with Lecter is one of the greatest scenes ever written. She’s been given a series of rules about interacting with Lecter, only to realize she must break them one by one, in order to win his co-operation, (“Closer, Clarice…”) The number one rule she’s been given is “Tell him nothing personal. Believe me you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” Only by breaking that rule can she win the day (though she does wind up empowering Lecter enough for him to eventually escape, and she wonders if it was all worth it.)
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