Red Dragon

An almost farcical wave of antipathy greeted the dénouement of Thomas Harris' novel Hannibal. This was perhaps voiced most indignantly by the illustrious figures that both opted out of the film adaptation (Jonathan Demme, Jodie Foster) and those that eventually participated (director Ridley Scott and writers David Mamet and David Zaillian). Therefore, the fidelity of Red Dragon to Thomas Harris' source novel comes laced with a certain sense of irony. While Scott and his collaborators tampered with Harris' gloriously morbid finale and insisted it was right to do so, director Brett Ratner has been equally adamant that it is only fitting that he and writer Ted Tally (reprising his duties from Silence of the Lambs) should remain faithful to their source material. Of course, this attitude is more a response to Michael Mann's Manhunter, the 1986 adaptation of Red Dragon that also opted to omit large portions of the novel seemingly rich with possibility. The comparisons with Manhunter are unavoidable yet ultimately futile - the subsequent passing of Hannibal Lecter into the pop cultural consciousness means that, despite their best intentions, Ratner and Tally are as much serving a range of pre-suppositions as they are transposing Harris' original conception of his monstrous creation. While Mann was able to able impose a considerable authorial presence upon his adaptation, Ratner and Tally are ultimately encumbered by the task of presenting Lecter's introductory tale to an audience now saturated in both real and fictional serial killer lore.

Depicting events prior to Silence of the Lambs, the film is propelled by the procedural, investigative quest of its protagonist. Several years after capturing Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), Will Graham (Ed Norton) is persuaded out of retirement to investigate a series of lunar cycle murders in which entire families have been wiped out. In order to pursue his quarry, the eerily empathic Graham elicits the opinion of Lecter in order to establish a suspect profile. This is complicated by the establishment of a correspondence between Lecter and the killer that threatens the safety of Graham's own family.

Whatever their respective qualities or defects, Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal are all distinctly the product of idiosyncratic directorial personalities. Therefore, one of the chief shortcomings of Red Dragon is the sense of a filmmaker never truly responding to the material beyond its central narrative thrust. To be fair, whoever took on this project was faced with the unenviable task of both offending a committed cult audience that champions Manhunter (and its own Hannibal Lecktor, Brian Cox) and pleasing those who demanded a return to the dramatic form of Silence. Furthermore, despite restoring the novel's ending (a twist that was cribbed by Dario Argento for his 1987 film Opera), there is a familiarity about the film that is the by-product of trying to restore the tonal register of Silence while also re-enacting scenarios already essayed so compellingly in Manhunter.

Nevertheless, for a filmmaker hitherto renowned chiefly for The Family Man and the Rush Hour films, there are several instances of macabre intensity that do full justice to the material. This is evinced most effectively by the sequence (omitted completely by Mann) in which the killer, Francis Dolarhyde (a grim faced Ralph Fiennes), visits the Brooklyn Museum and eats the William Blake painting, The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun, that has become the focal object of his deluded, murderous quest for personal 'transformation'. Less effective are the sequences in which Dolarhyde is tormented by the voice of his dead mother (an uncredited Ellen Burstyn), a device that merely comes over as a cursory nod to Psycho.

In collaboration with cinematographer Dante Spinotti (who also shot Manhunter), Ratner has moved away from the high modernist sheen of Mann's interpretation, imbuing the film with a drab, mournful ambience closer to Silence. This seems like a conscious rebuttal of the baroque, decorative excesses of Hannibal, as does the toning down of several grisly setpieces. Furthermore, Danny Elfman's conventional orchestral score has replaced the unsettling, often jarring rock soundtrack of Manhunter. As a visual reassurance, the film has faithfully replicated the subterranean dungeon that houses Lecter, a setting so familiar from Demme's film. This allows Ratner to cheekily invert the famous introductory dolly shot of Lecter in Silence - instead of appearing before us upright and attentive in the centre of his cell, he remains supine and concealed on his bunk, contemptuously greeting Graham with a mocking reference to his aftershave. This is an effective introduction to Hopkin's latest interpretation of the role. Retreating from the hammy wisecracking of Hannibal, his line deliveries are altogether more venomous, the spatial confinement somewhat paradoxically restoring some sense of genuine menace. As if overly conscious of persistently aping the brilliant use of facial close-ups in Silence, one encounter between Graham and Lecter is played out with the latter leashed to a ceiling, lending a certain visual fluidity and allowing for a more dynamic interaction between the two actors. Despite this, the film cannot match the sheer compelling force of the Hopkins/Jodie Foster encounters. As if to compensate for Hopkins limited screen time (and justify his prominence in all publicity materials), the film feels somehow obliged to insert short and largely inconsequential vignettes (one, involving a pair of caterers, threatens to drag the film into the comedic territory it has made such a show of avoiding).

The commercial imperative of emphasising Lecter has also led to a narrative framing device (itself a deviation from Harris) that depicts Lecter's capture and tidily sets up the events of Silence. But ultimately, this is Will Graham's story. Ed Norton appears somewhat boyish in the role, lacking the sense of experience, social introversion and borderline psychosis that made William Petersen's interpretation so effective in Manhunter. To make Graham somehow more palatable, Norton is given scenes in which he smiles regretfully at the home movies of a massacred family and comforts a near victim by gently joking about the state of her hair. The character's fundamental decency and sanity are never at stake, Norton never truly conveying a sense of an individual psychologically damaged by his encounters with killers, his wounds seemingly limited to the physical. In fact for such a distinguished cast, most of the supporting cast remain largely functional. Harvey Keitel, Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman all lend a gravitas to the production but their roles seem somewhat underwritten. Hoffman, an inveterate scene-stealer, barely registers at all until the sequence in which his character, a sleazy tabloid hack, succumbs to his fate. As Graham's wife Molly, Mary Louise Parker is required to do little except worry about her husband until her central role in the film's finale. To his credit, Ralph Fiennes somehow manages to convey a sense of the humanity underlying Dolarhyde's sickness, no mean feat considering the perpetually glazed scowl that marks his performance.

For all of the film's crowd-pleasing instincts, it at least attempts to confront the implications of its sensational themes. But one is left with the question of just what is there for Lecter to do now. Should Harris re-visit his creation, future film adaptations are already confronted with the headache of the series having pursued a radically different path to that envisaged by the author. Red Dragon has inevitably been informed not just by the previous Harris adaptations but the slew of serial killer narratives that followed in their wake. The opening title sequence, depicting the macabre scrapbook of Dolarhyde recalls the notebooks of Se7en's John Doe. Alternately, the flash cuts used to depict Graham's imagining of previous crime scenes remind one of Frank Black's visions in the television series Millennium. While the film is quite deft in its handling of suspense mechanics, it somehow fails to cut deeper. While being largely impersonal, it is thoroughly professional and certainly excites on a sensory level more effectively than Hannibal. Perhaps more importantly, the film manages to restore at least some sense of the fear and despair engendered by the serial murderer. While Lecter's role as a blackly comic, pop cultural anti-hero has become inescapable (the prologue sees him planning to dispatch a sub-standard flautist), his taunting of his captor ("you stink of fear but you're not a coward" he hisses at Graham at one point), adds a layer of personal bitterness to the character. Coupled with the sketching of Dolarhyde's personal torment at his murderous compulsion, the film actually goes some way to humanising its monsters. And as William Blake himself wrote, cruelty has a human heart…

Reviewed by Neil Jackson