Screen
Alleva, Richard
ination of slavery--helped to legitimize the destruction of Native American culture. Both slavery and Native American culture were sacrificed on the same altar of democratic and...
...Bergin smilingly agrees, politely excuses himself, enters the house, punches Roberts to the floor, and kicks her in the stomach...
...But it is an urge to caution and to a respect for complexity...
...But only for a moment...
...The couple dress for an important cocktail party, and he notes with mild disappointment that she isn't wearing the red dress he likes so much...
...The world of Sleeping with the Enemy includes smalltown idyllicism, sweet love scenes, moments of tenderness between a mother and daughter...
...The horror mounts until it bursts and catharsis is achieved...
...Cut to the cocktail party...
...Soon Lecter escapes and starts eliminating with gleeful ease anyone who gets in his way...
...She seems suddenly tremulous but he regards the mess affably and goes offto change...
...The serial murderer of Lambs is stalking large young women for their hides...
...Both films are well acted and expertly made...
...He is possessed by an emotion almost all of us have felt at some time: possessive love...
...That night, he brings her an expensive present...
...Her sandy hands dirty his suit...
...The film plays fair with its characters and with us...
...This evil Houdini, this malefic Punch, is launched into a story that is supposed to be as grimly serious and as compellingly veristic as an old "Dragnet" episode...
...Who cares about the original criminal Starling was supposed to catch now that Lecter is loose...
...Has it made it easier for us to justify the deaths of possibly sixty thousand Iraqi soldiers...
...Something unpleasant stirs in us despite the loveliness of the morning sky...
...He doesn't pound us with scary music, end every scene on a sinister note, photograph his actors to look like escapees from a Diane Arbus exhibit (though he does include one shot of Bergin drinking from a water fountain that makes him look like a predatory fish...
...carnite...
...I suppose I should admire Demme's versatility, but how can I applaud when a vital artist turns into an efficient ghoul...
...These interviews between plucky heroine and evil genius are the real core of the movie...
...As in the play, Equus, interviewee only surrenders information when interviewer does...
...SILENCE'& 'SLEEPING' leeping with the Enemy and The Silence of the Lambs are psycho-stalker-horror movies with remarkably similar climaxes: young women moving through large, dark houses while being stalked by lunatic males...
...At this moment, the viewer has a glimpse of good and evil eternally staring at each other across an impassable force field that lifts this movie above the common run of melodrama...
...He is having sexual identity problems (to put it mildly) and is trying to construct a new body for himself out of the skins of his victims...
...Hannibal "the Cannibal" Lecter, whose analysis of the serial murders Agent Starling must solicit before she can crack the case...
...But he feels it to the point where any sign of spontaneity on the part of his beloved wife--a casual glance at a stranger, a bit of sloppy housekeeping---becomes an affront to his sense of possession...
...Could the stark moral alternatives--appeasement or democratic victory---offered by Bush really describe the facts of life and politics in the Persian Gulf...
...Like most lessons, the best historical judgments are those that are discovered rather than dictated...
...She's wearing the red dress...
...Costner's Sioux hold their property in common, live as nomads in a tribal structure, practice patriarchy, revere their elders, worship different gods, and otherwise contradict Anglo-American culture in dozens of ways...
...And these interviews contain the seeds of serious, gripping drama...
...The strength of moral judgments probably increases, in fact, with dispassionate objectivity...
...Then she opens a cupboard and puts all the cans inside into orderly little groups...
...Nor is it an apology for Saddam Hussein--who is no shrinking violet himself when it comes to simplifying history...
...I doubt if I will forget either for a long time...
...There is nothing in Silence of the Lambs as terrifying as the first fifteen minutes of Sleeping with the Enemy...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 5 April 1991:227...
...In his first interview with Starling, he stands motionless in his cell, his body as poised and potent as that of a danseur nobel...
...I have always valued Demme's films (Something Wild, Melvin andHoward) for their spontaneity and looseness...
...A splash of the usual red will do very nicely...
...That ideology allowed us to ignore the legitimate claims of the Indians--to dehumanize them--as a people whose resistance to American "values" was self-evident proof of their savagery...
...In a review of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Norman Mailer put his finger on that novel's central flaw: After reading three hundred pages of surrealistic atrocities, the reader begins to wonder if there will be purple blood in the next rape...
...Julia blithely counters that the red dress may be too skimpy for this cold weather...
...So, when violence breaks out in this very human world, it is more shocking than anything in the sweaty freak-show landscape of Silence of the Lambs...
...She thanks him for the correction...
...He is a very happy man...
...Her husband (Patrick Bergin), dressed for the office, comes up and embraces her...
...she straightens the towels...
...He looks across a crowded room at her, his eyes brimming with love...
...SCREEN WHAT'S FOR DINNER...
...Once a filmmaker achieves a certain amount of reality, there's no need to reach for the tube of purple blood...
...The actor's force and stylizations suspend our disbelief even when the plot leaves us gaping...
...226: Commonweal "Dragnet" has turned into Alien or Predator or The Exorcist...
...The villain here is a monster, but not an unmotivated killing machine...
...Julia Roberts walks idyllically along a Cape Cod beach collecting clamshells...
...When Clarice recalls the crystallizing episode of her childhood---a vision of lambs being led to slaughter on a ranch--Lecter psychologically feasts on the image as luxuriously as he has feasted on the flesh of his victims...
...But, in the case of The Silence of the Lambs, I will certainly try my best to do so...
...And director Jonathan Demme has turned into William Friedkin or Ken Russel...
...He knows his wife and her little needs so well...
...Have similar moral assumptions about "aggression" and the supposed Arab "lack of respect for life" clouded our judgment about Iraq...
...For owning such a great house, that is...
...She seems to be doing this in a state of near-panic...
...His idea of love is to turn the loved one into a component of himself...
...Each new work must up the ante of brutality...
...None of the rest of the movie--Roberts's escape from this marital nightmare, Bergin's pursuit of her, Roberts's discovery of true love with a young drama teacher, and the lrmal showdown between husband and wife--achieves the power of that first quarter of an hour...
...Lambs features two monsters: the aforesaid transvestite (trans"ANOTHER fad diet...
...whose pursuit by the FBI heroine, Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) provides the film's main plot but which is treated cavalierly by the scriptwriter...
...Moral assumptions about how "civilized Christians" should live blinded Americans to the humanity of Native Americans, and help explain the ferocity with which Indian society was destroyed...
...Skulls get shattered, noses get bitten off, blood splatters plates of food, a whole ambulance of medics gets slaughtered...
...Is it because his exertions make him breathe as furiously as an engine...
...It ties knots in our stomachs and then ties knots in the knots...
...There's no profound psychological revelation in the dialogue but the staging, with Lecter's reflected face (on the glass barrier of his asylum cell) superimposed on Starling's, makes you feel that there hasn't been such a diabolic/human confrontation since Mephisto strolled into Faust's study...
...Now he has made a movie that is more like a traffic accident than an entertainment...
...After washing up, he notices that the bathroom towels are not hanging in alignment on the towel rack...
...And, sure enough, that night they make love passionately...
...Yet she still seems slightly shaken...
...But why does she look at him so uncertainly the next morning when he does his calisthenics...
...And he thanks her for it...
...And when that component malfunctions, he must snap it into place...
...He points this out to her...
...Then along comes a movie like Sleeping with the Enemy which has only three brief moments of conventional violence but which keeps viewers riveted throughout its running time...
...I n Sleeping with the Enemy, knots are tied in order to be cut...
...Both slavery and Native American culture were sacrificed on the same altar of democratic and material progress...
...Outside, her husband chats with a fellow yachtsman who is joining them for an outing...
...None of this suggests that we should teach in a moral vacuum, acquitting ourselves of moral responsibility as individuals...
...Lecter, in short, is Superman, and Superman is no more believable when he's evil than when he is virtuous...
...It's really an unequal contest: what can an entire metropolitan police force do against a man who can open top-of-the-line handcuffs in ten seconds with a pen, who can fake a coma by slowing down his heartbeat, who can pause in the slaughter of two guards to savor a few bars from Glenn Gould's recording of The Goldberg Variations, who can not only identify the scent a woman has on with a single sniff but with a second sniff can identify the perfume she used several days ago, who can.., who can, for all I know, leap tall buildings with a single bound and shift continental land masses with just a little hard thinking...
...I think I've got that right, but I'm not sure because the script rattles off psychological analysis and police procedure at lightning speed in order to cram as much visceral horror as possible into two-hours running time...
...Anthony Hopkins does a virtuoso turn as Lecter...
...Joseph Ruben is not a relentless director...
...But Hopkins-Lecter overpowers the movie...
...As Starling probes Lecter for clues, Lecter probes Starling for the roots of her need to save people...
...and the psychotic but brilliant psychiatrist, Dr...
...History is full of object lessons in morality, but their force comes from the integrity of the discipline: if the story is told accurately, carefully, and responsibly, the moral conclusions emerge with ease...
...But nothing shakes our interest in the story or characters, either...
...Yet, for most of that quarter of an hour we see nothing more than the portrait of a seemingly happy marriage...
...That is now the problem with nearly all horror-suspense films...
...The yachtsman remarks that he's often passed by the house, has once noticed the wife at a window, and considers Bergin quite a lucky man...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 7
