What elevated The Silence of the Lambs above your average, studio-produced serial-killer thriller, to the point of winning five Academy Awards?
For Oscar voters, it was likely the acting. Both Jodie Foster (as Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee assigned to an urgent, unsolved case) and Anthony Hopkins (as Hannibal Lecter, the imprisoned, cannibal psychiatrist Clarice interviews for insights into the murders) won Oscars for their (truly great) performances. But for me, the distinguishing factor is the sense of humanity director Jonathan Demme brings to this inhumane material. (Demme also won an Oscar, as did Ted Tally for his screenplay adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel.)
Consider an otherwise perfunctory scene, in which Starling and her FBI superior, Crawford (Scott Glenn), attend the funeral of another victim of the killer who has been dubbed “Buffalo Bill.” When Crawford leaves Starling in the funeral parlor to have a powwow with the local cops, she peeks through a door to observe the grieving family. Her attention is Demme’s attention—not just to the logistics, the “facts of the case,” but to the real human cost those things represent.
This emphasis on human dignity was always Demme’s trademark, but it might seem out of place in this genre. And you could argue—as members of the transgender community have since the film’s release—that it doesn’t extend to Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), aka Buffalo Bill, whose blurred gender identity is part of the movie’s formula for freaking the audience out. Yet The Silence of the Lambs still stands apart for its attentiveness to its characters’ emotional state, embodied by Demme’s signature shot: an extreme close-up focusing as tightly on a face as possible, often to the point of making eye contact, so that we are forced to recognize the person as a human being. A number of characters are the subject of this shot in The Silence of the Lambs—Crawford, even Lecter—but none more so than Starling. Beset by killers on one side and chauvinist colleagues on the other (there are repeated shots of Starling surrounded by skeptical men in uniform), she’s nonetheless given dignity by the camera in each scene.
Of course, Foster’s performance contributes to this as well. An actor of extreme intelligence, Foster is a natural for the role of an FBI wunderkind rising in the ranks despite the odds. And in every scene, even the ones in which she’s not being challenged by Lecter, you can see Starling’s mind racing behind those eyes, as she negotiates the sexism and skepticism surrounding her without losing sight of the case’s facts. Yet in Foster’s defining scene—in which Starling shares a memory from which the movie gets its title—she also shows us how fragile Starling’s extreme competence is, considering it’s built as a bulwark against the trauma of her past.
All of which brings us to Hopkins, who manages the rare miracle of a performance that is at once gargantuan and acutely observed. Yes, there is the line about fava beans followed by that slurp, as well as the way he says “Clarice,” as if each letter was a fava bean itself. Ultimately, though, it’s the little touches that make Lecter such a chilling figure. Consider the early moment when he asks to see Clarice’s credentials and tells her to come closer to the glass wall of his cell. As she steps forward, he holds his gaze on her face for a few eerie beats longer than necessary, before glancing down at the badge. Or notice the way he fleetingly closes his eyes, with a shiver of blissful memory, when Clarice reminds him what he did with the trophies from his crimes: “You ate yours.” In the end, Lecter’s defining trait is a menacing stillness, a way of sucking in the gravity of a room without barely lifting a finger.
At the Oscars, Craig McKay was nominated for editing, a recognition that The Silence of the Lambs was not only an acting showcase, but also a supremely crafted picture. (The editing in the climactic sequence, in which Starling and Crawford separately close in on Gumb, is almost criminal itself in its red-herring duplicity.) Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography strikes a nice balance between bureaucratic austerity and operatic intensity. (I love that the red glare of the security lights in the prison holding Lecter are presaged by a set of old-fashioned cell bars, where Starling must wait, that are inexplicably painted their own bloody hue.) So all in all enough, indeed, to win Best Picture—no small thing for a grisly genre piece in an era when Oscar tastes tended toward Dead Poets Society, Driving Miss Daisy, and Field of Dreams.
