I’m going to start out by saying that, in a vacuum, I don’t feel strongly about The Silence of the Lambs one way or the other. It’s not a bad film, but neither is it a great one. I liked it, but I did not love it. I thought Jody Foster was great, and I thought Anthony Hopkins was superb. They deservedly won Best Actress and Best Actor respectively for their roles in this picture. I thought that it was a fine piece of film making, and Jonathan Demme also would win Best Director, so this film swept all of the top awards on Oscar Night for 1991. I think that the problem for me was that I could never get emotionally engaged in the film or with the characters. It’s definitely creepy and it’s definitely scary in parts, and I think that the film makers honestly tried to create an emotional bridge between Clarice and the audience, but I just couldn’t find it.
I believe that what ultimately made The Silence of the Lambs such a commercial and critical success was that for its time it was a relatively shocking piece of film making. It finished the year as the #4 film at the box office and it has a 95% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was regarded as a Thriller, but it skirts the line with Horror as well, and was the first film of either genre to break through and win Best Picture, even though similar films like The Exorcist and Fatal Attraction had been nominated in previous years. The subject matter was not very main stream and much of the film’s success relied on its shock value.
That to me is the main reason that I found it underwhelming. I had seen it when it first came out, and I wasn’t a huge fan of it then because I’m not a huge fan of the Horror genre. I remembered very little about it, so for all intents and purposes this was just like seeing it for the first time. This was a film that was meant to be shocking to an early 1990’s audience, and now 24 years on, whether due to our desensitization or just the passage of time, that shock value is no longer there and that’s why this film doesn’t really hold up. With the shock value gone, the thrill has been taken out of the thriller. If you think about it, the subject matter isn’t that much different than anything that you can see these days on CSI or SVU or any other number of cop shows that you can see five nights a week on network television. That means that it’s up to the performances of Hopkins and Foster to carry the film, and while they’re both great, the story isn’t as strong as the actors’ performances and the passage of time has really caused this film to lose its edge.
However we do not live in a vacuum, so the point could be made that without The Silence of the Lambs, we wouldn’t even have those shows to begin with and that is a totally valid argument with which I would 100% agree. The influence of The Silence of the Lambs was felt right away with other films like Se7en and then later with the aforementioned television detective shows. Indeed, a very strong case could be made that The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most influential films in the history of cinema and that influence has stood the test of time.
Unfortunately the diminished, or even lost, shock value, leaves behind a story that, while compelling, isn’t as strong as it could be. A better and more engaging story might have allowed this film to age better, but that’s not the case. Don’t get me wrong, I like the story. I thought it was solid, but it’s just not the type of extraordinary and emotional story that I’d like to see from a Best Picture winner. The problem was that they tried to get us to care about Clarice (Foster) by giving us her back story through her interrogation at the hands of Hannibal Lecter (Hopkins). While Hopkins performance is sinister in his exploitation of Clarice’s childhood memories, we learn too much back story through dialogue. I know it can be difficult, but I would have liked to see a little more care given to Clarice’s development so that it wasn’t so on the nose. I think back to the development of a litany of characters throughout the history of cinema whose back stories were revealed as the film went along within the context of the story because their back stories affected how they responded to what was going on in the present.
A perfect example is the scene where Clarice is remembering moving to a relative’s farm in Montana after her father was murdered. It was a sheep and horse ranch and one night she ran away because she couldn’t handle listening to the lambs scream anymore when they were slaughtered. She snatched one up and ran away but was later picked up by the police and then was sent to live in an orphanage. Then Lecter says to her, “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? Wake up in the dark. You hear the screaming of the lamb… And you think if you save poor Catherine, you can make them stop, don’t you. You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again. With that awful screaming of the lambs.” A few sentences is all it takes to encapsulate Clarice’s inner motivation, and the exchange between Lecter and Clarice is one of the great moments of the film, and yet it leaves me somewhat hollow because all of this information is told to us. They use some flashback scenes to show is the trauma of the death of Clarice’s father and the scars that she still has over it at other points in the film, so I wish they had taken a similar approach to this scene. There could have been a great moment of tension if we had seen the young Clarice entering the barn filled with screaming lambs. How disturbing would that combination of visuals and sound been? Then while we’re still hearing the lambs screaming, perhaps a couple of shots of her waking up in the night with a start. Finally having Lecter sum it all up with his professional, yet psychotic diagnosis of her mental state might have been even more chilling and the whole scene would have been more engaging for having watched it rather than having it told to us.
Here is a link to the scene on Youtube, and you’ll see that Hopkins’ performance especially carries the scene and the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd7e1fXYIuM
While I was watching The Silence of the Lambs, I couldn’t help but come back to the thought that this is a cop movie. There are certainly aspects of the Thriller and aspects of Horror, but the only really scary scene is when she’s looking for Buffalo Bill in the dark and we see her from his POV through the night vision goggles. He could kill her at any moment and the tension in that scene is almost unbearable. There are also some scenes that, at the time would have been quite gory, but feel very tame by today’s standards. The scene I’m thinking about mostly is the one where Lecter escapes and kills the two guards. I remember really being sickened by that scene in 1991, but barely batting an eyelash when I watched it the other night.
There is one other thing I’d like to mention about The Silence of the Lambs and that is the fact that AFI named Hannibal Lecter as the #1 villain of all time. That’s certainly a subjective opinion, but an easy one to defend, and it again comes down to the sheer power of Anthony Hopkins’ performance. Certainly there was great dialogue written in the script and the basis of his character came out of the story, but this character is so memorable precisely because Hopkins made him so.
Overall The Silence of the Lambs is a very good film, but I would challenge anyone who hasn’t seen it in a long time to watch it again with an open mind and determine if it really has held up and stood the test of time. It’s my opinion that the film itself has been outlasted by its influence. It continues to influence film making, television and popular culture, but it has been left behind by the need for heightened levels of shock in order to really affect audiences.
Did the Academy get it right?
Oof. It’s hard to argue that on Oscar night, they probably did get it right. Even though no thriller/horror film had ever won Best Picture, The Silence of the Lambs was probably the one to break through that glass ceiling. As mentioned above, it was one of the highest grossing and most critically acclaimed films of the year. It’s also ranked #65 on the original list of AFI’s top 100 films of all time. No other film that was nominated year made the list. The Prince of Tides, directed by Barbara Streisand was a gripping and sometimes disturbing love story between a man and the psychiatrist of his sister as they go through his family’s past and try to determine why she attempted suicide. JFK was another controversial film from Oliver Stone, and it painted a number of possible conspiracy theories behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was a controversial film, but also had an all-star cast including Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, and Sissy Spacek, among many, many others. Bugsy was a biographical mob picture starring Warren Beaty and Annette Benning about how Bugsy Seigel started Las Vegas. All of those were fine films, but imperfect films as well. To be bluntly honest, my favorite film of 1991 was Beauty and the Beast. Now for the sake of full disclosure, I’m an animation guy. I’ve worked in the animation industry for 15 years and got my degree in animation from USC. But before you scoff at the notion that it could be Best Picture over The Silence of the Lambs, consider that it was the #3 film at the box office for the year and Rotten Tomatoes has it at 93% certified fresh, so the films are comparable to each other from a numbers standpoint. I would also challenge people to watch that film (the original version, and NOT the re-release with the “Human Again” sequence) with an open mind and appreciate the character arcs and complete story structure and development within the film. It is a remarkable film that was well-deserving of Oscar consideration. However with all that said, I can’t say that the Academy made the wrong decision, especially when you consider what that film meant in its own contemporary time. In a vacuum, it was the right winner for Best Picture of 1991.