Manhunter

Including the current television series (which if you never watched it, how dare you), Hannibal Lecter has appeared in a (loose) franchise with 6 distinct entries. The television series, Hannibal, may be the most artistically daring and original of the various works, but Manhunter was a clear and obvious influence. Based upon Red Dragon, the first of Thomas Harris’ novels to use Lector, Manhunter is also the second-best of the five films. (Sorry, but The Silence of the Lambs is just a magnificent piece of pop-thriller film-making.)

On its own merits, Manhunter is one hell of a film. With a serial killer, dubbed The Tooth Fairy but preferring to call himself the Great Red Dragon over his obsession with that painting, targeting happy families, Will Graham is called back into the FBI. Graham had previously captured Hannibal Lecter (called Lector here, for some reason), and he uses that infamous killer as a springboard to find the Tooth Fairy, a killer with seemingly no clues or traces of where to find him. Graham’s strong sense of empathy allows for him to enter the minds of killers, to figure out their tactics and motivations, to work from the inside out to find them.

All of this is old hat if you’ve seen Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon, or you’ve been watching the television show. No matter, Manhunter, despite being roughly thirty years old, is still a refreshing spin on the material. Director Michael Mann’s clinical detachment, tight sense of framing, and expressionist use of color suites the material just fine. The very 80s shine is all surface level, and it isn’t long until we’re descending into more shadows and use of light to evoke mood and tension.

Harris’ purple prose and melodramatic narrative twists are underplayed by all involved, making the action seem, somehow, real and true. William Petersen’s Will Graham has a clear descent into near-madness to play. Petersen’s handsome face slowly drains itself of life and energy, most of this is accomplished with just his eyes. By the end, he’s wearing a haunted look that makes one question if he can return to some semblance of normalcy after staring into the abyss for so long.

Brian Cox’s portrayal of Lector is an interesting departure from the more polite, if uneasy Anthony Hopkins, and the faux-gallantry and tortured poet of Mads Mikkelsen. Cox chooses to play his Lecter as the physical embodiment of intellect gone evil. He’s a series of wild eye flashes and honey-voiced threats, but this Lecter isn’t in it enough to leave a more impressionable mark. Perhaps a fault of the script, or perhaps an artistic choice, but it seems odd to deny us one of the most dastardly charismatic parts of the story for so much of the running time. Tom Noonan is much better as the Tooth Fairy, a character we almost feel some sympathy for in his inability to relate to his fellow man, but not enough to make us forget about the horrific crimes he’s routinely committing. His physicality alone is imposing and distressing, and once we get to a scene where he tortures and kills a journalist, any positive feelings towards the character have long evaporated into a sense of dread and fear.

If Manhunter has any problem, and it wasn’t one for me, it’s that the entire thing feels artificial, fussily designed and staged. This tilts the dramatics more towards the abstract, teetering on the brink of hallucinatory nightmare images dancing before our eyes. This is purposefully remote and icy, not the funeral dirge and without the sense of repeated trauma of The Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter is but another option in adapting the source material. I think it’s underrated and undervalued as a film, and I can see its influence in films like Seven.