Hannibal's third course

Taste the fear: Ralph Fiennes and Emily Watson in Red Dragon.

10 April 2012

Red Dragon, the new Hannibal Lecter thriller, looks like being over before it starts. A smart supper party chez Lecter, entertaining Baltimore Symphony Orchestra big-shots (Dr Lecter is a patron).

Quotes from Horace, the Roman lyric poet. No tears shed over a flautist who's been off-key in several concerts; odd about his disappearance, though. Smalltalk about the antipasto: "Delicious ...what's in it, Dr Lecter" - "You wouldn't eat it, dear lady, if I told you."

But soon after the guests have gone, before the doctor can do the dishes, he's lying for dead across his dining table, beside the floral arrangement of eggplant, blood oranges and fava beans, six bullets in him and a sheaf of tribal arrows through his ribs.

End of film? No, only the beginning of a movie that ends where we began in The Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon is a prequel to the film series: the first of Thomas Harris's novels that introduced the liver fancier, and used him as consultant to Will Graham, an FBI psychological profiler, to catch the Tooth Fairy, another monster with less picky tastes for his next meal.

Played by Ralph Fiennes - it's creepy how Hollywood plunders the ranks of British classical actors to play degenerate and deranged villains - this rival for Hannibal's headlines slays sleeping families after getting to know them through home videos. Oddly, Red Dragon is the lethal side of last week's One-Hour Photo, in which Robin Williams insinuated himself imaginatively into the lives of happy families whom he'd "stalked" through printing their home snapshots.

Both films prey on the vulnerability of contemporary family life. Fiennes is less of a joker than Hopkins: brush-cut, dead face, hair lip, an abused childhood and an obsession with William Blake's metaphysical illustrations, one of which, the diabolical Red Dragon, he has tattooed on him from neck to heel.

The film dwells on the aftermath of slaughter, not the act. All the same, the voyeuristic details of the crimes that call Graham (Edward Norton) back into the line of duty and jeopardy after getting Lecter's number, and which he is required to solve by empathetic identification with the killer by his boss (Harvey Keitel), are gross: it should be a Certificate 18.

The film's most potent feature is the twin monsters' symbiotic relationship: medical materialism meets cannibalistic fantasy. Fiennes's fiend of the forensic labs meets Hopkins's fiend of the fleshly appetites.

Red Dragon is directed by Brett Ratner, who's turned from acrobatic Jackie Chan comedies to Gothic horror with impressive but impersonal efficiency. It lacks the teasing gettingtoknow-you bizarreness of The Silence of the Lambs, where Jodie Foster played out a sublimated love affair with the safely caged Hannibal.

Edward Norton, an actor of plain looks who uses his voice like a chisel to shape plain phrases, conducts his Q and A with Lecter through the same glass-fronted cell (an eerie borrowing from the fittings and fixtures of the Adolf Eichmann trial), but the flirtatious opportunities are fewer. The new film hasn't the thunderclap hyperbole of Ridley Scott's Hannibal. Nothing here to match the shock value of a hanged victim's guts hitting the piazza cobblestones a split second before his body follows. The Italianate look of Florence in that film incarnated Lecter's taste in "Renaissance values", as well as extravagant eating experiences.

Some critics said it dissipated the pressure-cooker temperature that an imprisoned Lecter worked up to in The Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon is like a burger joint compared with Hannibal's epicurean flavours. As it gets more outlandish, it grows more banal. Fiennes's Tooth Fairy takes his pen-pal Lecter as a model and promises to avenge him. Where he's heading is obvious - toward Norton's family unit.

But there's a grim entr'acte when Philip Seymour Hoffman's gossip writer is repaid for bad-mouthing the Tooth Fairy in his column by being superglued to his torture chair before losing the chief instrument of such tittle-tattlers - his tongue. Emily Watson has a sizeable role, as a blind girl to whom Fiennes shows affection - as famous monsters of filmdom, from Boris Karloff onwards, have shown to women who are bad judges of who (or what) is romancing them.

A potentially interesting twist is the Tooth Fairy's late-developing attempt to reform himself, which leads to an unexpected act of aesthetic cannibalism in the printsanddrawings room of the Brooklyn Museum. But this deviation into the Fine Arts is checked in favour of a straight-down-the-line finale of family jeopardy we've seen many times.

Paradoxically, the first of the Hannibal Lecter chronicles feels the tiredest of the lot - how many times can you offer the same menu? Folk with long memories will recall that Michael Mann filmed the same story in 1986 under the title Manhunter, with Brian Cox as Hannibal and Tom Noonan as the Tooth Fairy, and did it with oppressive focus on the psychology of the lawman, not the pathology of the two predators. There's probably enough life left in the Lecter mythology to create a "must see" audience for a déjà-vu experience. It's handsomely photographed by Dante Spinotti (who also shot Manhunter) while The Silence of the Lambs designer Kristi Zea has made Hopkins feel at home by re-creating Lecter's "brainî cell.

She also forges a mischievous link with his past by modelling the interior of his Baltimore home on the dwelling space of Sigmund Freud's place in Vienna. The rawest meat in movies these days is served with the most fastidious presentation. If this is your taste, bon appetit!

Red Dragon
Cert: cert15

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Hannibal's third course

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