Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins gave indelible performances in the Oscar-sweeping adaptation of Thomas Harris’s terrifying novel“You know what you look like with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube.”It takes almost no time for Hannibal Lecter, the mightiest of all fictional serial killers, to size up Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.
This Lecter is not like the passive monster Brian Cox had played in Manhunter, Michael Mann’s 1986 adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.
Cox’s version is disengaged, as if humankind were a bore and a hassle, but Anthony Hopkins’s Lecter asserts his serene brilliance and power at every opportunity, which here means taking the scalpel to the FBI trainee sitting a few feet and a wall of thick glass away from him.
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