Over the last couple of years, it seems the major studios have taken the hint from Criterion and decided to release the kind of "special edition" discs they made famous. As a proud owner of the Criterion release of Silence of the Lambs, I almost passed on this one. But I had a feeling about it, since it sports a new Hi-Definition, anamorphic transfer and Dolby 5.1 sound, as well as a new documentary and its own collection of deleted scenes. I was not disappointed by the purchase. While it is missing the wonderful Criterion commentary track, the documentary is surprisingly good; the deleted scenes - one in particular with Hopkins doing a surreal monologue about what makes a serial-killer tick - are quite illuminating. The picture looks great. The sound has greater definition, too - I can actually hear nuances in the orchestration of Howard Shore's moody background score that are simply lost in the Criterion release. As for the film itself - by now, everyone knows that it's a Campbell-esque "hero's journey" dressed up as a gothic horror/suspense yarn. Unusually, the hero is a woman - FBI agent trainee Clarice Starling (played by the deservedly Oscar-winning Jodie Foster). Her humanity is played against the rather baroque extremes of self-loathing serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), who kills women and skins them to make himself a "girl suit" and escape his identity. It is a meditation on institutional sexism as much as anything else, as Clarice must fight the continued "little woman" stereotyping and perverted leering of her almost exclusively male coworkers. The subtext rather uncomfortably reminds us that the serial killer's behavior is really just an extreme version of what often passes as normal "boys will be boys" behavior in the "real" world. In this respect, Silence of the Lambs is, paradoxically, a very feminist film about men who destroy women because they - again, paradoxically - hate their own male-ness and see it as a fraud. Except for Dr. Hannibal Lecter (the brilliant, also Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins). He does not hate women any more or less than men. He hates rudeness, and is an equal-opportunity killer. The grim joke is that he is the most civilized and humane male character in the film: he treats Clarice with courtesy and respect. Hannibal is like the Shadow Self inside all of us - that vampiric character who stands at the end of the long, dark hallway of our nightmares, the one with the quiet, insinuating, evil voice. In Thomas Harris' novel of Hannibal, he becomes Clarice's shadow in an almost literal sense, and she learns to embrace him. But we can't have that in the movies, so Silence of the Lambs restricts its focus to the mythic/heroic aspect of the story, which ends up working very well, if it also ends up lacking a certain edginess or depth present in the novels. I would recommend buying this disc along with Hannibal, then watching the two films one right after the other, to get the full effect. Thomas Harris, in his novels, did not want us to get so hung up on Clarice as a hero that we missed the bigger picture about the seduction, corruption, and eventual purification of the human soul. Both films of his Clarice Starling books aim a lot lower, but they do manage to hit their somewhat reduced targets.
Over the last couple of years, it seems the major studios have taken the hint from Criterion and decided to release the kind of "special edition" discs they made famous. As a proud owner of the Criterion release of Silence of the Lambs, I almost passed on this one. But I had a feeling about it, since it sports a new Hi-Definition, anamorphic transfer and Dolby 5. 1 sound, as well as a new documentary and its own collection of deleted scenes. I was not disappointed by the purchase. While it is missing the wonderful Criterion commentary track, the documentary is surprisingly good; the deleted scenes - one in particular with Hopkins doing a surreal monologue about what makes a serial-killer tick - are quite illuminating. The picture looks great. The sound has greater definition, too - I can actually hear nuances in the orchestration of Howard Shore's moody background score that are simply lost in the Criterion release. As for the film itself - by now, everyone knows that it's a Campbell-esque "hero's journey" dressed up as a gothic horror/suspense yarn. Unusually, the hero is a woman - FBI agent trainee Clarice Starling (played by the deservedly Oscar-winning Jodie Foster). Her humanity is played against the rather baroque extremes of self-loathing serial killer Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), who kills women and skins them to make himself a "girl suit" and escape his identity. It is a meditation on institutional sexism as much as anything else, as Clarice must fight the continued "little woman" stereotyping and perverted leering of her almost exclusively male coworkers. The subtext rather uncomfortably reminds us that the serial killer's behavior is really just an extreme version of what often passes as normal "boys will be boys" behavior in the "real" world. In this respect, Silence of the Lambs is, paradoxically, a very feminist film about men who destroy women because they - again, paradoxically - hate their own male-ness and see it as a fraud. Except for Dr. Hannibal Lecter (the brilliant, also Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins). He does not hate women any more or less than men. He hates rudeness, and is an equal-opportunity killer. The grim joke is that he is the most civilized and humane male character in the film: he treats Clarice with courtesy and respect. Hannibal is like the Shadow Self inside all of us - that vampiric character who stands at the end of the long, dark hallway of our nightmares, the one with the quiet, insinuating, evil voice. In Thomas Harris' novel of Hannibal, he becomes Clarice's shadow in an almost literal sense, and she learns to embrace him. But we can't have that in the movies, so Silence of the Lambs restricts its focus to the mythic/heroic aspect of the story, which ends up working very well, if it also ends up lacking a certain edginess or depth present in the novels. I would recommend buying this disc along with Hannibal, then watching the two films one right after the other, to get the full effect. Thomas Harris, in his novels, did not want us to get so hung up on Clarice as a hero that we missed the bigger picture about the seduction, corruption, and eventual purification of the human soul. Both films of his Clarice Starling books aim a lot lower, but they do manage to hit their somewhat reduced targets.