Thomas Harris (novel)
Edward Norton
Ralph Fiennes
Harvey Keitel
Emily Watson
Phillip Seymour Hoffman
It's been more than a decade since Jonathan Demme's Oscar-wrangler The Silence of the Lambs wooed audiences with Anthony Hopkins playing the infamous Dr. Hannibal Lecter. After taking a disappointing and slightly over the top detour in 2001 to the Ridley Scott picture, Hannibal, Hopkins is back to the Lecter we all came to love more than ten years ago in Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, The Family Man) adaptation of Red Dragon.
Previously released as the Michael Mann film Manhunter in the 1980s, Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon deals with Hannibal Lecter when he was a free man and how he got caught and helped the FBI on a serial killer case. I have never seen Manhunter, but I know it does not have Hopkins in it and can safely assume that it loses much of the magic. Ratner brings us Red Dragon with Hopkins and even the screenwriter of Lambs, Ted Tally (David Mamet and Steven Zillian did Hannibal) on the crew. With much of the same crew who brought us Lambs and some brilliant new additions like Edward Norton as FBI agent Will Graham and Ralph Fiennes (the psychotic Nazi in Schindler's List), Red Dragon proves to be a vast improvement over Hannibal.
The film begins in 1980 as we watch Hannibal attending a symphony. Hannibal, always obsessively observational, takes notice of a flute player, a Mr. Benjamin Rasbell (the victim with his head in the jar in Silence of the Lambs), who is making the music sound horrible with his lack of talent. We cut to a scene of Lecter throwing a dinner to the symphony board and when one of the guests asks what's on the menu, Lecter responds that if he told they would "be afraid to try it". They quickly begin a conversation on the missing Benjamin Rasbell and where he could be. Ironically enough, the answer is right in front of them.
Following his dinner, Lecter receives a visitor, FBI agent Will Graham. They have been collaborating on a case involving the "Chesapeake Murderer" and Will has just made a break in the case. The murderer is not stealing the victim's body parts for a keepsake, he is eating them. Lecter tells his friend that this is an interesting fact and decides to fetch Graham his coat. Will makes the discovery that the murderer is Lecter but is attacked by Lecter. However, Will brings Lecter to justice and we flash to a number of years later.
Graham has since retired and the FBI needs his help to find a serial killer who takes out whole families. Nicknamed the Tooth Fairy by a sleazy journalist (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the killer (Ralph Fiennes) brutally murders the families in correlation with moon cycles and leaves bite marks from a pair of his Grandmother's dentures on their bodies. Will decides he cannot solve this case alone and goes back to Hannibal for help. It seems that the Tooth Fairy is evolving into a mythic figure known as the "red dragon" and will soon reap his fury upon another family. However, what Graham does not know is that the Tooth Fairy is a fan of Lecter's work and the good doctor has told him where to find Graham's family.
The direction of the film goes back to the Hitchcockian roots that Demme brought us back in Lambs and was substituted for extreme gore in Hannibal. Ratner would rather show us character reactions than the violence itself which makes the horror more effective. Norton, Hopkins, Fiennes and the whole talented ensemble seems to do quite well with the material, giving the film a great character backing which was missing in Hannibal. Red Dragon, while it isn't another Silence of the Lambs, isn't near the blasphemous Hannibal and comes closer to Lambs than most thrillers these days.
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