some thoughts on The Silence of the Lambs
Jan. 24th, 2015 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingGenerally speaking, I think movies made from books are never as good as the original material. The Silence of the Lambs has not joined my short list of exceptions.
This is not to say that it's a bad movie! No, it's a very good movie. It deserved that Oscar. But the book is better.
Obviously the case had to be streamlined, which was by and large done sensibly. Benjamin Raspail's backstory with Jame Gumb exists largely for atmosphere and to give Clarice Starling things to figure out, so it's fine to remove the whole "find Raspail's car" business and also to ditch the murdered lover and decapitate Raspail instead. Cutting the stuff where Starling searches Catherine Martin's apartment and talks to Senator Martin was also a wise choice. And it's sensible to keep the searching through hospital records offscreen, as well as to compress the moth identification into one scene. So that all makes sense.
Cutting the subplot about Jack Crawford's wife dying of cancer definitely affects the mood of the resulting story, and makes Crawford a much flatter character, but again, streamlining is necessary and that was an obvious and sensible thing to ditch.
The changes in Starling's backstory on the ranch also work; actively trying and failing to rescue the lambs is a simpler, and therefore stronger, image for the audience. (In the book, she successfully rescues a single horse that would otherwise have been killed and turned into meat and glue, and the screaming lambs are merely what woke her, and what she left behind as she rode away.)
The biggest loss in the transition from page to screen is the sense of how much the situation costs Starling: the way she misses tests, falls behind in her classes, and is in danger of flunking out of the FBI academy because she's spending so much time on the case. Jodie Foster certainly projects determination and concern for the victims, but it's not the same without seeing tangible evidence of what she's choosing to sacrifice.
I am undecided what I think of the changes in her backstory before the ranch. In the book, the memory of her father's death is tied up in her mother's reaction to that death, and how Starling connects that to her own taking care of Kimberly Emberg, the poor girl with the pierced ears and painted nails found in West Virginia. Removing her mother increases the trauma of her father's death, but... I dunno. (It's not necessary for simplification. She has to specify that her mother had previously died, so it would have been just as easy to specify that her mother couldn't afford to keep all her children without her husband's salary.)
I dislike that Starling doesn't get to be the one who takes the fingerprints and photographs in that incident, since that's Crawford's excuse for bringing her along in the book. She does clear the local police out of the room, make a verbal record of the examination, and provide a verbal analysis of Buffalo Bill where she works out some facts about him from first principles, but even so. I don't like anything that makes her seem superfluous.
On that note, I really dislike the changes to the scene in Gumb's basement after he kills the lights. Yeah, the movie keeps the part where Starling hears him cock his gun and locates and shoots him based on that noise, but I have no use for the time before that where she's flailing around to no apparent purpose. In the book, she is terrified -- quite reasonably so! -- but she gets low to the ground and makes her way, purposefully, back toward the staircase with the goal of finding a fuse box.
I will bet you a hundred dollars that if a male character had been onscreen in that situation, he would have been allowed to act like Starling does in the book. But not a woman. Not in 1991, and probably still not today, almost twenty-five years later.
The movie does very well at retaining the sense of Starling as a woman isolated in a hostile, male-centric world. This is done partially through visuals -- Jodie Foster is a smallish woman, and she spends most of the film surrounded by much larger men, who tend to stare at her like she's an object rather than a person. Reducing the moth identification scenes aids that, actually, since in the movie both Roden and Pilcher come across as skeevy. But the part where Chilton tries to flirt with Starling, and the part where she tells Crawford he set the wrong example by using her sex and gender as the excuse to get the sheriff into a private conversation, are taken entirely from the book.
(I am very weirded out by having Roden and Pilcher attend Starling's graduation from Quantico, given how sleazily they were portrayed earlier. That only makes sense based on the book characterization, where Pilcher is much more polite and actually ends up maybe dating Starling at the end.)
The movie is surprisingly non-graphic, considering the subject matter. Demme exercised a lot of discretion in what could be incredibly gory scenes and shots, and the victims are not sexualized in the slightest. (Except for poor Fredrica Bimmel's nude photos, which belonged to Catherine Martin in the book and which I don't think needed to be included in the film at all.) I suspect Jame Gumb dances naked in front of a mirror rather than watching old beauty pageant videos of his mother as another attempt to downplay the sexual victimization of women as much as possible.
Both book and movie are dated in their terminology vis-à-vis transsexualism, but in both cases it's explicitly stated that Gumb's actions are not remotely representative of transgendered people and his issues have other causes. Perhaps that distinction might not have registered with viewers twenty-five years ago, when there weren't really any positive or neutral portrayals of trans people widely available in mass media, but hopefully these days he comes across as a specific person rather than an example of an entire group that he may not even be a part of.
I was very pleased that Catherine Martin's plan to hold Gumb's dog hostage made it to the screen. I love that part of the book -- just as Senator Martin is clever to mention her daughter's name a lot and show her baby pictures to humanize her, so Catherine is clever to identify her one way to affect Gumb, make a plan to capture the dog, and then pull it off. I was also pleased that Ardelia Mapp exists in the movie! She even gets to help Starling work on the case file, instead of just helping her study and being an emotional anchor.
I liked the intercutting of the SWAT attack in Calumet City with the doorbell ringing in Belvedere. That's probably a moment that works a little better if you've read the book -- you know why Calumet City is a wrong address -- but even without an explanation it's a nice bit of editing. There are a few other moments where I think it helps to have read the book first, because the movie doesn't stop to explain little details -- that the FBI has been tracking moth imports and subscriptions to moth-and-butterfly magazines, that Starling was in Memphis to search Catherine Martin's apartment, etc. -- but nothing is as utterly inexplicable as Gandalf's moth-sent-to-Radagast-who-sends-an-eagle escape from Orthanc in the LotR movies, so whatever. Narrative flow carries you past any glitches.
Hmm.
Oh right, Hannibal Lecter. Honestly, for me he's the least interesting part of the movie. Anthony Hopkins is so over the top that I had a hard time taking him seriously, particularly after watching Mads Mikkelsen's much more restrained performance on Hannibal. His little anagram games aren't in the book; they're a gimmick to make sense of the plot streamlining the screenplay does with the case and Lecter's cheerfully provided misinformation. The escape scene is pretty much straight from the book, though actually a bit less graphic on the screen than the page. And of course in the movie Chilton accidentally leaves his pen in Lecter's cell and thus provides the material for the handcuff key; that's both appropriate in a karmic comeuppance sense, and much simpler to get across visually than trying to explain that Lecter had constructed a key months ago from other people's careless errors, and had just been waiting for a situation where it might be useful.
But really, Clarice Starling is the heart of the story; it lives and dies with her characterization. I miss seeing her do technical forensic work, and I miss seeing her consciously decide that she's willing to flunk out of Quantico rather than abandon Catherine Martin and the case, but aside from the sexist warping of the basement scene at the end, she makes it largely intact from book to screenplay and Jodie Foster brings her convincingly to life.
So yeah. A good movie. Still not as good as the book, but a very good movie. I'm glad I watched it. :D
-----
(For the record, the two movies that I think are better than their source books are The Princess Bride and Mysterious Skin. There are probably also some movies that are better than their source short stories, but while those face the problem of translating from one medium to another, they don't have the problem of how to tell the same story while chopping at least half of it out.)
This is not to say that it's a bad movie! No, it's a very good movie. It deserved that Oscar. But the book is better.
Obviously the case had to be streamlined, which was by and large done sensibly. Benjamin Raspail's backstory with Jame Gumb exists largely for atmosphere and to give Clarice Starling things to figure out, so it's fine to remove the whole "find Raspail's car" business and also to ditch the murdered lover and decapitate Raspail instead. Cutting the stuff where Starling searches Catherine Martin's apartment and talks to Senator Martin was also a wise choice. And it's sensible to keep the searching through hospital records offscreen, as well as to compress the moth identification into one scene. So that all makes sense.
Cutting the subplot about Jack Crawford's wife dying of cancer definitely affects the mood of the resulting story, and makes Crawford a much flatter character, but again, streamlining is necessary and that was an obvious and sensible thing to ditch.
The changes in Starling's backstory on the ranch also work; actively trying and failing to rescue the lambs is a simpler, and therefore stronger, image for the audience. (In the book, she successfully rescues a single horse that would otherwise have been killed and turned into meat and glue, and the screaming lambs are merely what woke her, and what she left behind as she rode away.)
The biggest loss in the transition from page to screen is the sense of how much the situation costs Starling: the way she misses tests, falls behind in her classes, and is in danger of flunking out of the FBI academy because she's spending so much time on the case. Jodie Foster certainly projects determination and concern for the victims, but it's not the same without seeing tangible evidence of what she's choosing to sacrifice.
I am undecided what I think of the changes in her backstory before the ranch. In the book, the memory of her father's death is tied up in her mother's reaction to that death, and how Starling connects that to her own taking care of Kimberly Emberg, the poor girl with the pierced ears and painted nails found in West Virginia. Removing her mother increases the trauma of her father's death, but... I dunno. (It's not necessary for simplification. She has to specify that her mother had previously died, so it would have been just as easy to specify that her mother couldn't afford to keep all her children without her husband's salary.)
I dislike that Starling doesn't get to be the one who takes the fingerprints and photographs in that incident, since that's Crawford's excuse for bringing her along in the book. She does clear the local police out of the room, make a verbal record of the examination, and provide a verbal analysis of Buffalo Bill where she works out some facts about him from first principles, but even so. I don't like anything that makes her seem superfluous.
On that note, I really dislike the changes to the scene in Gumb's basement after he kills the lights. Yeah, the movie keeps the part where Starling hears him cock his gun and locates and shoots him based on that noise, but I have no use for the time before that where she's flailing around to no apparent purpose. In the book, she is terrified -- quite reasonably so! -- but she gets low to the ground and makes her way, purposefully, back toward the staircase with the goal of finding a fuse box.
I will bet you a hundred dollars that if a male character had been onscreen in that situation, he would have been allowed to act like Starling does in the book. But not a woman. Not in 1991, and probably still not today, almost twenty-five years later.
The movie does very well at retaining the sense of Starling as a woman isolated in a hostile, male-centric world. This is done partially through visuals -- Jodie Foster is a smallish woman, and she spends most of the film surrounded by much larger men, who tend to stare at her like she's an object rather than a person. Reducing the moth identification scenes aids that, actually, since in the movie both Roden and Pilcher come across as skeevy. But the part where Chilton tries to flirt with Starling, and the part where she tells Crawford he set the wrong example by using her sex and gender as the excuse to get the sheriff into a private conversation, are taken entirely from the book.
(I am very weirded out by having Roden and Pilcher attend Starling's graduation from Quantico, given how sleazily they were portrayed earlier. That only makes sense based on the book characterization, where Pilcher is much more polite and actually ends up maybe dating Starling at the end.)
The movie is surprisingly non-graphic, considering the subject matter. Demme exercised a lot of discretion in what could be incredibly gory scenes and shots, and the victims are not sexualized in the slightest. (Except for poor Fredrica Bimmel's nude photos, which belonged to Catherine Martin in the book and which I don't think needed to be included in the film at all.) I suspect Jame Gumb dances naked in front of a mirror rather than watching old beauty pageant videos of his mother as another attempt to downplay the sexual victimization of women as much as possible.
Both book and movie are dated in their terminology vis-à-vis transsexualism, but in both cases it's explicitly stated that Gumb's actions are not remotely representative of transgendered people and his issues have other causes. Perhaps that distinction might not have registered with viewers twenty-five years ago, when there weren't really any positive or neutral portrayals of trans people widely available in mass media, but hopefully these days he comes across as a specific person rather than an example of an entire group that he may not even be a part of.
I was very pleased that Catherine Martin's plan to hold Gumb's dog hostage made it to the screen. I love that part of the book -- just as Senator Martin is clever to mention her daughter's name a lot and show her baby pictures to humanize her, so Catherine is clever to identify her one way to affect Gumb, make a plan to capture the dog, and then pull it off. I was also pleased that Ardelia Mapp exists in the movie! She even gets to help Starling work on the case file, instead of just helping her study and being an emotional anchor.
I liked the intercutting of the SWAT attack in Calumet City with the doorbell ringing in Belvedere. That's probably a moment that works a little better if you've read the book -- you know why Calumet City is a wrong address -- but even without an explanation it's a nice bit of editing. There are a few other moments where I think it helps to have read the book first, because the movie doesn't stop to explain little details -- that the FBI has been tracking moth imports and subscriptions to moth-and-butterfly magazines, that Starling was in Memphis to search Catherine Martin's apartment, etc. -- but nothing is as utterly inexplicable as Gandalf's moth-sent-to-Radagast-who-sends-an-eagle escape from Orthanc in the LotR movies, so whatever. Narrative flow carries you past any glitches.
Hmm.
Oh right, Hannibal Lecter. Honestly, for me he's the least interesting part of the movie. Anthony Hopkins is so over the top that I had a hard time taking him seriously, particularly after watching Mads Mikkelsen's much more restrained performance on Hannibal. His little anagram games aren't in the book; they're a gimmick to make sense of the plot streamlining the screenplay does with the case and Lecter's cheerfully provided misinformation. The escape scene is pretty much straight from the book, though actually a bit less graphic on the screen than the page. And of course in the movie Chilton accidentally leaves his pen in Lecter's cell and thus provides the material for the handcuff key; that's both appropriate in a karmic comeuppance sense, and much simpler to get across visually than trying to explain that Lecter had constructed a key months ago from other people's careless errors, and had just been waiting for a situation where it might be useful.
But really, Clarice Starling is the heart of the story; it lives and dies with her characterization. I miss seeing her do technical forensic work, and I miss seeing her consciously decide that she's willing to flunk out of Quantico rather than abandon Catherine Martin and the case, but aside from the sexist warping of the basement scene at the end, she makes it largely intact from book to screenplay and Jodie Foster brings her convincingly to life.
So yeah. A good movie. Still not as good as the book, but a very good movie. I'm glad I watched it. :D
-----
(For the record, the two movies that I think are better than their source books are The Princess Bride and Mysterious Skin. There are probably also some movies that are better than their source short stories, but while those face the problem of translating from one medium to another, they don't have the problem of how to tell the same story while chopping at least half of it out.)
