Something happened in 1991 that my daddy never believed possible: Tommy Lee Jones played a gay man.
And the shrill and very vocal faction of the homosexual community cried foul at not only his portrayal, but of the portrayal of homosexuals in “The Silence of the Lambs.” GLAAD led a protest of “Basic Instinct” before the movie had even wrapped principal photography, and the controversy continued when Tri-Star released the picture during so-called Awards Season in 1992.
“J.F.K.” – Great filmmaking and mythmaking.
“The Silence of the Lambs” – The winner, released all the way back in February of 1991, and a genuine crowd pleaser.
“Beauty and the Beast” – I’m not saying it’s a bad movie, but it’s inclusion smacks of tokenism, as in, “There. We nominated an animated movie. Now leaves us alone.”
“Bugsy” – Another good movie, but I remember thinking, “If this gangster movie wins after ‘Goodfellas’ lost, I’ll threaten a boycott like my gay friends did.”
“The Prince of Tides” – The stink here was that Babs wasn’t nominated for best director. It had to have stung that Ridley Scott was nominated instead for directing “Thelma & Louise,” a wrongly politicized road movie about two women on the run from the law. Babs also missed out on scoring one for women when John Singleton was nominated for “Boyz N The Hood.” The irony, I guess, is that all these years later, both “The Prince of Tides” and “Boyz N The Hood” feel like TV movies.
What should have been nominated:
“Terminator 2: Judgment Day” – A bullet, from beginning to end, and one of the great action movies of all time.
“Cape Fear” – Pure over-the-top, preposterous escapism. But I can’t get enough of it.
“What About Bob?” – I’m sailing!
“J.F.K.” – Mostly I love how actors pop up in often bizarre characters who are in only one or two scenes and just knock it out of the park. Like Kevin Bacon, John Candy, and Joe Pesci.
“The Silence of the Lambs” – More pure escapism, expertly crafted, scary, tense, and just plain awesome. It deserved every award it won and more.
There are many, many things to love about Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of the novel by Thomas Harris. Of course the screenplay and performances are great. And in refusing to allow Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) to ever give a big speech about how difficult it is to be a woman in a man’s world, the film gives us no choice but to side with her. Make no mistake about it, the movie is in many ways about how difficult it is to be a woman in the world of law enforcement, but Demme shows us this instead of having his characters hammer it home with dialogue. Demme’s pacing is just right, the movie builds and builds, a creeping sense of dread increasing with every scene as the stakes are constantly raised.
When we meet Clarice in the movie’s opening scenes, it’s obvious she feels she has a lot to prove. We’re not told exactly why she feels this way until fairly late in the movie, but it’s a feeling that pervades every scene in dialogue and in the way Demme, working with Director of Photography Tak Fujimoto, frames his shots. When Clarice first meets Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences division, they exchange pleasantries over traditional two shots and over the shoulder shots. As Crawford settles in behind his desk, and Clarice across from him, again, Clarice is framed over Jack’s shoulder, which establishes her eye line for the scene. But when Demme cuts to Jack’s close-up, he’s looking dead ahead, his eyes boring into Clarice — and us. When Demme cuts to Clarice’s close-up, the camera is directly in front of her, but she maintains the eye line she established in the previous over-the-shoulder shot. In this scene, Demme establishes a pattern and establishes a first person point of view that puts us inside Clarice’s head and defines the hunt for Buffalo Bill as Clarice’s personal crusade.
The plot of course concerns the serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted “I’ll Take This Part But Give Me a Month to Completely Transform My Looks Or I’ll Never Act Again” Levine), so named because he skins his victims. Over thirty minutes pass before we ever meet Buffalo Bill, but the hunt is on in the form of an “interesting errand.” Crawford gets the crazy/brilliant idea that maybe the infamous serial killer Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) will help profile Bill, but only if he’s given the right motivation. Clarice twice interviews him, and while he sees right through the ruse, he sees something in Clarice and agrees to play ball — on his terms. He knows Crawford and Clarice will have to play ball, because Buffalo Bill will undoubtedly soon find his next victim.
In minor stroke of genius, the victim, Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith), is introduced driving alone, singing “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, drumming on the steering wheel as the camera pulls back from a close up and holds for a moment before pushing back to a close up again. Demme cuts to his first shot of Buffalo Bill, wearing night vision goggles. As he turns them on for a glimpse of Catherine, the goggles hum and whir creepily, and moments later — the stakes increase.
There are no slow moments, and we’re never given a chance to question the absurdity of Buffalo Bill’s bizarre plan or his ridiculous ritual involving exporting moths, both of which could have seriously felt contrived and could have caused the movie to completely collapse. Instead, the whole thing builds to not one but two incredible fake outs, neither of which feel like director’s cheats.
Thinking about “The Silence of the Lambs” reminds me what it used to be like to see a movie in the packed theater, the audience drawn to the movie just because of a good trailer and a great cast. Sure, the book was popular and no doubt its fans showed up, but it wasn’t an eagerly anticipated adaptation with a ton of hype. There was no Comic Con buzz, no negative buzz; we did not know what to expect. People screamed at scary moments, laughed at the humorous moments — a true collective, shared experience. We were putty in Demme’s hands. Finally, I remember the finale, in which Clarice is trapped, alone with Buffalo Bill, and he turns out the lights. The hum and whir of the night vision goggles swells on sound, and some dude eight rows up and to my right bellowed what we all were thinking: “Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, shit!” And everyone laughed, nervously.
There used to be more experiences like that at the movies. It wasn’t an anomaly–it happened all the time. Does it happen at all anymore?
As for the criticisms and purported homophobia…huh? Stung, Demme next directed “Philadelphia,” an exercise in political correctness that garnered Tom Hanks the first of his two Academy Awards. But “The Silence of the Lambs” will probably forever be his masterpiece.
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