Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The Silence of the Lambs is the sixty-fourth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. It’s straight into the fire for FBI agent in training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster.) There’s a serial killer on the loose and ambitious Quantico student is tasked with interviewing one of the most notorious murderers of all time, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins.) Her supervisors hope that she can coax information and analysis out of the renowned psychiatrist turned cannibal. Excited at the opportunity, Starling gets more than she bargained for as Lecter toys with her head and the digs into her past. The Silence of the Lambs is grimy, unafraid to wallow in the dark and grotesque corners of the human psyche. Demme’s camera lingers on Hannibal’s intense, unblinking gaze, it spirals as Clarice is inundated with some twisted new revelation. By supplementing them with brilliant, eerie filmmaking techniques, he gets the most out of two truly exquisite performances. The dance Hopkins and Foster engage in is laden in deception and a touch of schadenfreude. The classic example of the blurring lines between a serial killer and the detectives hunting them down. It is worth digging down on the performances here as well because they are some of the more astounding in the brief history of cinema. Foster plays her FBI agent in training as if she is constantly trying to plaster over the cracks in Clarice’s fracturing confidence. Hoskins, on the other hand, imbues such assuredness into his ruthless cannibal that he feels almost alien. Familiar but undeniably threatening. The characters these two help to form serve as the bedrock for every mind game the film subjects its viewers to. Gender also plays an integral role in The Silence of the Lambs, both through the impact it has on Clarice’s standing in the FBI and the confused gender identity of the man she hunts, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine.) Not explicitly trans — actually Lecter definitively says Bill is not — he hunts down women in an effort to hide among them as a woman. Meanwhile Clarice cannot seem to shed the burden of her gender in a male dominated profession. In a way the heart of the film is the collateral damage from a society that so rigidly polices gender roles. More than anything, Demme’s film exemplifies what fiction can do in the field of crime and psychological thrillers. Today we see dozens of true crime documentaries dumped on streaming, each trying to cash in on people’s insatiable appetite for the morbid and their curiosity for the wicked. Where those real stories follow a rote formula that robs them of any truth, The Silence of the Lambs soaks itself so deeply in the morose that it approaches the feeling of reality. It is an immense achievement in filmmaking and a tremendously entertaining film as a result. 9/10
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