Admittedly, a lot went wrong with the 2001 sequel to Silence of the Lambs-- Thomas Harris' source material, with its seemingly character-defying twists turned off much of the first film's creative team, including director Jonathan Demme, writer Ted Tally and lead actress Jodie Foster, sucking a good deal of life from the prospect of the sequel to a film that captured that rare combination of box-office and critical success. While talent was plenty in the replacements producers sought to fill those roles, few of the new team quite lives up to the challenge. Julianne Moore does her best as Clarice Starling, but she never recaptures the same chemistry with Anthony Hopkins that her predecessor did. Likewise do screenwriters Steven Zaillian and David Mamet fall short of Tally's tight script work, overreaching themselves with eloquent embroidery instead of introspective economy.
But if there's one member of the Hannibal team who nearly redeems the project, it's the man that Dino De Laurentiis wisely chose to direct-- Sir Ridley Scott. Bravely straying from the static realism that drove Demme's film-- a bold choice of its own, helping the horror-thriller defy the Academy's anti-genre bias by scoring the major Oscars of 1991-- Scott's hand soaks in as much atmosphere and sensuality as possible, with a camera which lingers over landscapes and human faces like as longingly as though it were lovestruck with everything it sees. This approach can be alarming when those landscapes and faces are stateside, such as during Starling's FBI sting gone terribly wrong or whenever Gary Oldman's monstrous Mason Verger enters the picture.
In the film's protracted scenes in Florence, however, Scott's filmmaking shines, and moreover helps to draw in all the themes its script occasionally has trouble articulating in a language as concise as the director's visuals. Perhaps the best example of Scott's rare successes in Hannibal are in the outdoor opera sequence midway through the film, where the esteemed Dr. Lector (masquerading as Medievalist scholar Dr. Fell-- one of the coy literary jokes Thomas Harris peppered throughout the original novel) attends a production based on Dante Alighieri's "La Vita Nuova", joined by his adversary Detective Pazzi (the impeccable Giancarlo Giannini). For the film, Scott commissioned Irish composer Patrick Cassidy to write an aria based on Dante's first sonnet, describing his love-at-first-sight for his fabled muse Beatrice, who would later inspire him throughout his epic masterpiece, "The Divine Comedy".
Cassidy's music speaks for itself just as much as Scott's imagery does-- there's little wonder as to the popularity this relatively short piece of music has enjoyed over the years, particularly in Scott's own filmography (he added it to the soundtrack of Kingdom of Heaven's director's cut). But more importantly, the sequence represents a perfect example of the director's ability to blend music, set-design, composition and layering together into a cohesive cinematic whole, ably building an environment of exotic theatricality worthy of the "World Builder"'s reputation. He even manages to drive home many of the story's themes home much more clearly through the learned allusions to Dante, emphasizing Hannibal's connection to the heartsick Florentine poet through music and visuals instead of merely settling for a handful of literary quotes. In moments like these, Scott is able to humanize the iconic monster of Hannibal Lector into something akin to a Byronic hero, a figure as epic and romantic as he is cruel and calculating.
