If the title of this brawl isn't a clue, I'm comparing the movie versions of these stories: Manhunter from 1986 and Silence of the Lambs from 1991. All other sequels and remakes and spinoffs will be ignored, as will the actual source material; I remember my parents immediately and entirely dismissing Manhunter for not being a hundred percent faithful to the novel, and it's that sorta dogmatic science that can make these kindsa things a lot less fun. And we all need to get more fun out of life.
I wanna talk about Lambs first because I saw it first and that may play some subconscious role in my very subjective POV. I've told the story dozens of times, how I got to see it at the Drive-In in the summer of '91 which allowed me to have a strong enough opinion to root for it come Oscar season. But in hindsight I think my age at the time is a good objective indicator of how great the movie is; at 8 years old I responded to the suspense, the drama, the humor, the subtexts (mostly), not because the movie is dumbed down but because it's coherent and engrossing in competent ways. A lotta "Psychological Thrillers" can get too big for their britches and become bogged down in ham-fisted metaphors and psychobabble to differentiate themselves from the "Horror" movies - there were a lotta films like that around this time, and except for maybe a bare breast or climactic shootout they were always tedious -- very tedious. Lambs (like most Thomas Harris material) embraces the detecting side of detective work; the case is as fresh to Clarice as it is to us, so progress feels less like exposition and more like unfolding. So what that tells me is that there's no shame in holding the attention span of a child, nor is there ever any need to set the bar lower to appeal to kids.
But apart from being "easy to follow" the movie had some other things going for it as well. Again, partially due to The Oscars, it was the first time I really took note of Acting with a big A, as in "Wow, these are Academy Award-winning performances!" Though as I got older I began to recognize some hokiness in that - Anthony Hopkins in particular (though that may've been due to his subsequent reprisals of the role). Now I'm in a place where I understand that if you change one ingredient in the movie (in any movie) then you get an entirely different movie, and picturing Silence of the Lambs with a different "approach" from its cast is almost unimaginable; those iconic closeups and line deliveries aren't only locked into the film, they're a permanent fixture of Pop Culture. It's more than fair to give the movie's director some credit for these qualities, but as a kid I certainly didn't understand what his contributions were or how they worked; again, I knew he was good enough to get an Oscar for it but I didn't know what the criteria was.
It wasn't until my late teens that Directors and Directing became my predominant interest in Motion Pictures -- however it was not the master craftsmanship of Brett Ratner that beckoned me to see Red Dragon in theaters, but rather the pedestrian interest in the franchise fodder that these stories had become. Further still, it was this 2002 adaptation that made me wanna seek out the supposedly "inferior" version with the goofy title. Manhunter had been on my radar for some time anyway; I'd already become a fully fledged Michael Mann fan by that point, and like I said I'd already been aware of it as a big disappointment to my parents so I was never too quick to see it. But this was the sparkling dawn of the DVD era, and so what was $20 to add to my measly Mann shelf? I do remember it turned into a bit of a hunt in and of itself - all Circuit City had was a "Double Feature" set of Hannibal and a fullscreen(!) Manhunter. I wasn't having that, and so in this specific time period that still allowed me to be picky, I went across the mall parking lot to Newbury Comics and found a used copy of the 2-disc "Limited Edition" from Anchor Bay, which came with a facsimile "case file" inside full of Will Graham's notes, a director's cut version, and a big ass blurb from Entertainment Weekly on the front that declared "Superior to The Silence of the Lambs". I was definitely dubious of such a bold claim, but the packaging and presentation alone was at least better than all 120 minutes of Red Dragon.
Anyone who ever watched this in its cropped 4:3 video version would and should understandably dislike the movie; there is nary a shot from beginning to end that doesn't utilize its 2.40:1 rectangle as the exciting canvas it was designed to be. Decades before he fully embraced handheld (and video) the Michael Mann Signature Style was a lot more about static symmetry and slow zooms and fast dollies and lingering compositions and shamelessly erratic lighting, and this film is his best example of all that. Ergo, not only do I nominate it as his greatest looking movie, but one of the greatest of all time -- if not the greatest. Suffice to say my mild apprehension about the quality of this movie melted away in the neon glows of Dante Spinotti's cinematography and the moody synths of Shriekback and The Reds.
MY CHOICE: The style and aesthetic of Manhunter isn't exactly subtle by any means; it's colorful, it's sexy, it's sleek, it's cool. It's quite literally Miami Vice The Movie, 20 years before Miami Vice The Movie. And if that were the only requirement we could could pack up and leave now. But one quibble I've never been able to shake is how distant this movie feels from the Thomas Harris atmosphere that we didn't know we needed until Jonathan Demme and Tak Fujimoto seemed to perfect exactly how I feel it should be. Manhunter is an endless joy for me to watch for many reasons, but the suspense and spookiness and grossness of quirky serial killers doing weird serial killer things really came through with Demme - who also has his own not-so-subtle style; the grey dreariness of the setting, the actors staring directly into the lens, the icky extreme closeups of moth goo and nipple rings and ripped-off glitter fingernails, Howard Shore's haunted castle music, the diverse supporting cast of Demme regulars and seasoned character actors. Manhunter is a huge, impressive flex of technique and approach and panache and I absolutely have hearts in my eyes when I'm watching it, but Lambs feels like a richer, more personalized and succinct work that stays with you on a visceral level that you can feel deep within yourself.
- Paul
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