DR LECTER, I PRESUME.(Review)

FILM-MAKERS saving a major writer from betraying his own creation? Unbelievable! Not really, because this is what screenwriters David Mamet and Steve Zaillian and director Ridley Scott have done in Hannibal for Thomas Harris, the author of the original novel.

When the book was published in 1999 director Jonathon Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally--both of whom had won Oscars for Silence of the Lambs based on Harris's earlier Hannibal Lecter novel--took one look at the new work and bailed out of the planned sequel. So did Jodie Foster. It was not that Harris had written a turkey. Far from it, much of Hannibal is very good indeed, a combination of contemporary thriller and Jacobean tragedy with passages of near-cinematic writing that are a gift to any film-maker. The problem was the resolution, where Clarice Starling, Harris's feisty heroine from Silence of the Lambs, becomes virtually the bride of Hannibal Lecter:

 
   Hannibal Lecter, did your mother feed you at her breast? 
 
      Yes. 
 
      Did you ever reel you had to relinquish the breast to Mischa? Did you 
   ever feel you were required to give it up for her? 
 
      A beat. 
 
      I don't recall that, Clarice. If I gave it up I did it gladly. 
 
      Clarice Starling reached her cupped hand into the deep neckline of her 
   gown and freed her breast, quickly peaky in the open air. 
 
      You don't have to give up this one, she said, looking always into his 
   eyes. With her trigger finger she took warm Chateau d'Yquem from her mouth 
   and a thick, sweet drop suspended from her nipple like a golden cabochon 
   and trembled with her breathing. 
 
      He came swiftly from his chair to her, went on a knee before her chair, 
   and bent to her coral and cream in the firelight his dark sleek head. 

It really doesn't matter that Clarice is here a surrogate sister and possibly mother figure as well as bride and partner. In these last passages, which include the now notorious dinner party where Clarice and Hannibal dine off the living brain of the man who has destroyed Clarice's career at the FBI, Harris betrays much of what he has written in Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, the two earlier novels of the so-called Lecter trilogy.

This is a kind of betrayal of which only the finest writers are capable. Like all those lies Thackeray tells about the delicious Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair or Joseph Conrad abandoning the coolly sceptical Decoud to suicide in Nostromo. Not only don't we believe them but something infinitely precious has been lost to the works themselves.

I'm certain this is what Demme, Tally and Foster felt when they first read Hannibal. Harris's failure probably cut most deeply with Foster. Her embodiment of Clarice's vulnerability, compassion and heroism had helped make the film, for all its horror, a profoundly moral work. Certainly Foster and Hopkins had made Clarice's exchanges with brilliant serial killer Hannibal Lecter darkly ambivalent, but she could never have expected the ambivalence would be resolved quite like this or that me character of Clarice would be quite so degraded.

But with Harris entitled to $9 million for the screen rights alone, big money was at stake. So playwright-director David Mamet was brought in to work on the script and reportedly produced a 600-page first draft--a huge overrun in an industry where 200-page scripts are considered too long. Then Steve Zaillian was brought in to work on Mamet's draft. Zaillian's revision came in at a reasonably manageable 128 pages. This is the only version I have been able to see and while there are some lapses (sending Clarice off to become a private eye for former boss Jack Crawford is almost as bad as Harris's resolution) it is clear that between them Zaillian and Mamet create a powerful narrative that is remarkably true to the basic impulse of the original. At one stage Harris himself was called in and the formidable Ridley Scott also took a hand. We'll probably have to wait for the DVD's special features to find out who came up with what but the final resolution of the film is far truer to Harris's creation than anything the author wrote himself.