Hannibal Rising is like a pretty model at a fashion show — she’s alluring until she opens her mouth.

If Hannibal Rising had simply kept quiet, its icy surface might have been alluring. But the film finds that it must explain, express emotion, tell us what it thinks and what we should think. As soon as the blank calm of the film is broken by real (or “real”) emotion, the audience begins to titter.

It’s well known that novelist Thomas Harris has either cynically or through personal inclination drifted away from portraying the hardships and psychological cost of being in law enforcement. In his first book, Black Sunday, weight was evenly distributed between hunters, a coalition of FBI and Israeli agents, and the hunted, terrorists targeting the Super Bowl. In the Hannibal Lecter series that more or less began with Red Dragon, where Lecter was a minor character and really a part of the back story, Harris has shown himself to be increasingly fixated on Lecter. In The Silence of the Lambs he bubbles back up to the surface like an old tire in a garbage dump, taking possession of both the book and the movie made from it (a film which still maintains its regal priority over other adaptations by hewing closing to a semblance of reality). Its two sequels, Hannibal and now Hannibal Rising (a film written by Harris and released just a few months after the book on which it is based), are virtually all Hannibal, with diminishing returns. Ridley Scott and his collaborators wisely changed the ending of Hannibal the book. There, Clarice Starling became the drugged love slave of Lecter. In the film he escapes her clutches, sans a hand, to do battle with her again in some future yet unimagined continuation.

But instead of going forward, Harris has spun backward, into the past, first with a remake of Red Dragon that makes it reasonably consistent with Silence, and now with this evocation of Hannibal’s career up until his arrival in America. In essence he is going over already chewed fat. Hannibal Rising is an expansion of material already covered in the course of Hannibal. It results in a justification and apologia for Hannibal’s wicked ways.

Told strictly chronologically, Rising introduces us to the aristocratic Lithuanian Lecter family, fleeing the advance of, it appears, both the German and the Russian armies. Hiding out in their country lodge, which seems to be about two miles from their castle, the bulk of the family is cut down by a coincidence of both Germans and Russians. Alone with his beloved sister Mischa (there is no hint here of incest), Hannibal tries to survive but the lodge is soon invaded by Nazi aspirants, roving scavengers who, in a fit of dietary pique, consumed Mischa.

The rest of the film is a long revenge narrative, with Hannibal receiving some mentorship here and there as he methodically hunts down the five crude gourmands. As is to be expected in such tales, the kills start easy and increase in hardship as the villains become more complex and evil. In the end he heads off to Canada to cancel his final foe (which we don’t see) and the last shot shows his car merrily driving off, presumably to the American border, where he will eventually end up in Baltimore.

The film is an elaborate cat and mouse game, with Lecter down for a while, before getting a great boost from a near relative, Lady Murasaki Shikibu (Gong Li), who gives him martial arts lessons among other things. Lady Murasaki Shikibu is the modified, modern “conscience of the film, shrinking when Hannibal goes too far. Her equivalent is the Nazi hunter Inspector Pope (Dominic West), who is in competition with Lecter to find Mischa’s killers first. The result of the cat and mousiness, however, is that Lecter is imbued with moral certitude and higher justice on his side. This is hard to reconcile with both the sheer scary evil of the character in Red Dragon, and with the moral compass we are used to in movies. Maybe Lecter is a great guy, riding the world of “free range rude,” but in the end is little more than a more dynamic, physically stronger version of the cranky older teacher in Notes on a Scandal.

Problems with the film come in such moments as when the adult Lecter (Gaspard Ulliel, of A Very Long Engagement) dons a samurai mask off of a dummy in Lady Murasaki’s storeroom. Harris and / or director Petter Webber (The Girl with a Pearl Earring) seem to think that we all require this evocation of Silence, and its famous bite-prevention face wear. But this is a mask that he puts on intentionally, to commune with the spirits of samurai warriors. The first mask was designed to make transfer easier on his carriers. He didn’t like the prison mask, but seems to like the samurai mask. These confused intentions, or inability to maintain consistency with the materials at hand has always been one of the problems with the Lecter books and films, born perhaps from Harris’s adopting the villain as an avatar for his own cranky opinions on modern life.

Ulliel’s unusual visage, long and lean, evokes less Mr. Lecter than Mr. Sardonicus, or the Joker. He’s got a half moon of a dimple or scar on his left cheek and a smile that sharpens instead of curves. I think he is a good actor, but this is an impossible role, one already acted by two of Britain’s top actors. But by shearing any moral ambiguity from Lecter, Harris and Co. have reduced the character to a straw man, half-hero and half-villain and impossible for probably most actors to portray, what with so many fussy hands molding him and so many audience expectations. True connoisseurs of the villain will probably, as this slow-paced, glacial, and ultimately irrelevant film progresses, feel their tempers rising.

Comments: None