Word: lecter
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...seems, especially when he realizes that he's suddenly living the life he always wanted. Highsmith's book keeps the audience engaged just by introducing clearheaded, elegant Tom Ripley. He's fascinating because we know what he's capable of, which is just about anything. He's like Hannibal Lecter minus all that nonsense about fava beans and a nice chianti. But the movie takes the story in an entirely different direction simply by a shift of emphasis. Where Highsmith's 1950's novel barely dares to hint at any latent homoeroticism, the movie explicitly exposes Thomas Ripley...
...sequel of all time. The book hit stands in early June and promptly divided the critics; most agreed, however, that Harris had infused his carefully written Hannibal with profound themes and delicate character textures. What a joke! The book, in a nutshell, tracks Clarice in yet another search for Lecter and gradually going insane. By the end, she's his sex slave and they feast together on human brains while the victim--still alive--sits at the dinner table. Laughing...
...apparent by now, a reader's rooting interest in Hannibal is sorely conflicted. Sure, Lecter did some hideous things, but do we really want to see him tortured to death by that creep Verger? For long, long stretches in the middle of the novel, Harris himself seems to be of two minds on that very question. Employing his virtuosity as an orchestrator of suspense, the author puts Lecter, his facial appearance altered by collagen injections, in Florence, Italy, speaking impeccable Italian and lecturing to scholars on the works of Dante. Verger's network of spies has spotted Lecter there...
...then it's back to Maryland, where Lecter rents a lavish house not terribly far from the modest duplex of FBI special agent Starling, his antagonist/confidant during the period seven years earlier, covered in Silence. Verger's people know that Lecter, for complex reasons buried in his own psychoses, wants either to kill Starling or to protect her or, possibly, madman that he is, to protect her by killing her, and they hit upon a way to use her as bait to draw him to his presumed doom...
...Hannibal displays a disquieting streak of sadism that Harris' two previous novels involving Lecter largely avoided. In one of his many, rather portentous authorial asides, Harris states, "Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?" If Hannibal is the answer, we're in real trouble...