"The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) Review

Only three films in history have won the Top 5 Oscars (Actor, Actress, Screenplay, Directing and Best Picture). They are It Happened One Night, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. That’s kind of a weird combination, if you think about it. I mean, It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable, is a romantic comedy. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a drama in a mental hospital starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. And, The Silence of the Lambs is a freakshow (In a good way).

            The film is about FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster in an Oscar-winning performance) tracking down a serial killer known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine in an underrated performance), but in order to track him down, the FBI believes it takes one serial killer to know another, so she meets the brilliant, but psychopathic Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins in an Oscar-winning performance), a former psychiatrist who eats his victims, hence his nickname. Dr. Lecter offers information on Buffalo Bill to Starling in exchange for information about her personal life.

 

The first thing I want to talk about is the performances of Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins and Ted Levine. As I stated before, Foster and Hopkins both won Oscars for their performances, and they definitely deserved their trophies.

Hopkins and Foster give some of the best performances ever given by an actor or actress, with Hopkins giving probably the most chilling, creepiest and most realistic performance of a villain since Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates.  His dialogue is Shakespearean and poetic, and his delivery is so perfect and spot-on, you believe he is a psychopath.

 

The creepiest thing, to me, about Hannibal Lecter is that he rarely blinks. That makes Lecter creepier than most motion picture villains and just like a real psychotic cannibalistic serial killer. Just as creepy, in my opinion, is Buffalo Bill, portrayed to perfection by Ted Levine.

Buffalo Bill is a serial killer that kidnaps women who are considered somewhat overweight, puts them in a pit in his basement, starves them for three days, then shoots them, skins them and dumps them in various places, including the Elk River in West Virginia (My home state).

 

So, what is Buffalo Bill’s plan? Well, he’s creating his own “woman skin”, which means he skins his victims and puts their skin on a mannequin-type body, thus creating his own woman skin. Now, that is really messed up. Levine’s performance as Buffalo Bill is so twisted and crazy, that just like Hopkins as Lecter, he seems so realistic, and you buy him as a psychopathic serial killer.  I am very surprised Levine did not get a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance. Scott Glenn is also very good as Jack Crawford.

 

The film won five Academy Awards in 1992 (Best Actor, Actress, Picture, Directing and Adapted Screenplay), and I agree with every win, although I am still on the fence about the film winning for Best Picture. The other nominees that year were The Prince of Tides, Bugsy, JFK and Beauty and the Beast.

It’s very odd for the AMPAS to nominate a horror movie for Best Picture, as it has only happened two other times before 1991, when The Exorcist was nominated in 1974 and Jaws was nominated two years later in 1976. The last two horror films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense in 2000 and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan in 2011. On top of that, acting nominations in the horror genres are rare, too.

Besides Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, other horror nominees include Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller and Linda Blair for their performances in The Exorcist, Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, and Ruth Gordon for Rosemary’s Baby who won Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1968 classic.

But, even if some may not agree with the win for Best Picture, The Silence of the Lambs is a thrilling, scary, intense, flawlessly acted, superbly directed, superbly written and claustrophobic film that will stay with you after you watch it for the first time.