The controlling question at play here — did the Academy pick the best Best Picture? — is contrarian in nature, and skeptical readers might wonder if, for no other reason than to be contrary, I'm begrudging a movie its success just to pick on perceived failures of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The acid test there is pretty obvious: If the movie I'm saying should have won had won, would I turn around and defend the movie I'm now trying to diminish?
In this case, the answer is: Yes, probably.
The Silence of the Lambs is a movie about which I have already perhaps written too much. It's a solid genre picture that fulfills many generic expectations — and even exceeds some of them through the quality of its acting and the occasional sublimity of its script. But its sterling moments aren't matched by an equivalent profundity of theme; this it keeps at a B-movie level. The best genre stuff usually has something significant going on at a subtextual level, some interesting idea to ponder; Silence does as well, but it's little more than to contrast the graceful and considerate cannibal with the dishonest and despicable "regular folks" who orbit around FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). We're seduced by Silence's homicidal male lead to the extent that the movie closes with him on the loose and we consider this a happy ending. Hannibal (Anthony Hopkins) helps Clarice comes to terms with herself through the marvels of well-applied therapy — it practically makes him a savior.
Obviously (to anyone who's seen the movie, at least), the best part is the interplay between Clarice and Hannibal — though not a love story, per se, their chemistry crackles. It has to be deduced that this is what the movie's popularity was based upon; it didn't delve very deep into psychological waters outside of the confines of these two, and the police procedural stuff was standard at best, and a cheat at worst (the intercutting between Starling arriving at the killer's house while her boss is pursuing a wrong lead is offensively heavy-handed).
Again, it's a fine movie, and had it not won Best Picture, the case could be made that this was another instance of the Academy ignoring a genre piece done well. But when instead it joins that very elite class of films to win the Big Four — Best Actor, Actress, Director and Picture (throw in Adapted Screenplay and make it Best Five) — it's blown up so big and given praise so fawning that it behooves us to scrutinize it more closely and hold it to a higher standard. As much as it would be nice if it were true that we can consider text without context, we can't.
Speaking of segues into discussing JFK, director Oliver Stone was well-established as something of a crackpot himself when he chose to make a film that approached post-Camelot America with incendiary muckraking zeal, using the real-life figure of Louisana District Attorney Jim Garrison as his avatar with which to do nothing less than accuse Lyndon B. Johnson of complicity in John F. Kennedy's death. It's an astonishing film from every vantage — even if Silence warranted the Best Picture Oscar over JFK, Stone was more deserving of the Best Director accolade than Jonathan Demme.
Having said that, what's perhaps most astonishing about the film is its clumsiness — Stone wants to suggest that the military-industrial complex (a term I use only because he would) wanted Kennedy out of the picture so he could no longer do something so foolhardy as try to take American soldiers out of Vietnam, and Stone expends a lot of exposition to set the stage properly. The movie moves in these fits and starts, cycling fairly dry exposition from the principals followed by crazed exposition from some conspiracy loon. More kudos to Stone, then, for making it so magnetically watchable; Costner gives as great a performance as he ever has as Garrison, despite being saddled with one of the longest monologues in the history of the movies. The passion on display here is so fiery that you're almost embarrassed for the movie as you would be for anyone devoted to something so blatantly and so ardently. When, upon seeing Robert Kennedy shot, Garrison grabs his head as if to keep his mind from exploding at the cosmic terribleness of it all, you can practically see Stone as you can only rarely see a director by watching his work.
The whole movie is a marvel of evangelical fury, and it works — you can't watch Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) and continue to believe in the lone gunman theory. Stone throws half-answers into the mix, but he knows he hasn't got anything more solid to hang his movie on — not even Stone would say the movie is a model of veracity or that he has accurately or even fairly represented the characters involved (and many would agree). Because the facts are so deeply buried and so nearly immune to discovery, Stone has to be satisfied with just provoking viewers. He does it; a leaden touch is often involved (Garrison speaking directly into the camera, etc.), but it's near impossible not to feel provoked by the intensity of his white-hot fury.
While the rest of the Best Picture field was not barren this year — Beauty and the Beast in particular was as stunning a realization as there has been of the Disney formula — it's easy to imagine the prize going to the political docudrama about one of America's most sensitive issues while the popular favorite is relegated to being just a wannabe genre flick of aberrant quality. Given two different films in those positions, it would be easier to pull for the thriller as the underdog. But the coldness of The Silence of the Lambs doesn't stand up against the heat of what may be Stone's true masterwork, and in 1992 it would have been good to see the prize go to the movie that puts its heart so nakedly on display.
— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)
