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MANHUNTER
8/10
USA
1986 : Michael Mann : 120mins
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in 1985, [Dino de Laurentiis and his wife] bought the rights to Thomas
Harris’ best-selling thriller Red Dragon, from which they produced
the 1986 movie Manhunter… The film, which features the first,
brief appearance of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter (played by Brian
Cox), was inventive, frightening, and well-reviewed, but it grossed a
paltry $8.6 million, less than the cost of its print ads. The De Laurentiises
were disappointed. “Manhunter was not Red Dragon,” Dino
says. “Manhunter was no good.”
Premiere magazine, February 2001.
The
subsequent box office successes of both Lecter (The Silence of the
Lambs) and Mann (Last of the Mohicans and Heat) make,
in retrospect, the failure of the their joint project one of the mysteries
of mid-80s American cinema. At the time, it must have been a conspicuous
disaster, given Mann’s phenomenal small-screen success with Miami Vice.
After The Keep, this was his second commercial bomb in a row, and
he didn’t try again until Mohicans five years later. But while
The Keep remains barely known, and usually disappoints those who
do bother to seek it out, Manhunter’s reputation has soared over
the years – it’s now almost a cliché to say it’s a better movie than Lambs,
and to prefer Cox’s Lecter (or rather, Lecktor, as he’s spelled here)
over Hopkins’ Oscar-winning turn. Clichés, perhaps, but in this instance,
deadly accurate ones.
For
all its rough edges, Manhunter was the first sign that Mann might
be something out of the ordinary, a film-maker of rare confidence and
technical skills. Ironically, what were once derided as his main weaknesses
– his flashy visuals and soundtrack indicating an apparent preference
for style over substance – are now part of his distinction. Mann slyly
uses the mid 80s’ prevailing gaudy aesthetic, putting it at the
service of narrative and character. His film has a seductive visual sheen,
with particular attention paid to colour, but it’s part of his powerful
synthesis of subject and style. In his hands, Manhunter aims beyond
just being another fast-paced police-procedural thriller, towards psychological
analysis of its central characters’ states of mind.
One
reason why Lecktor’s screen debut caused less of a splash than his subsequent
‘Lecter’ appearances is that he’s comparatively underexposed here. But,
as incarnated by Scottish stage star Brian Cox – a bold choice, as at
this point virtually unknown in Hollywood – he dominates the movie in
much the same way, delivering his terrific lines with a convincing combination
of impish zest and a chilly Edinburgh hauteur, but none of Hopkins’ glassy-eyed
ham. Lecktor’s role in the two movies is very similar – we have an FBI
agent (William Petersen as Will Graham, the ‘manhunter’ of the title)
tracking down a serial killer (Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde), and
turning to the incarcerated Lecktor (he doesn’t get out in this one) for
advice. As in Lambs, Lecktor and the agent have a special psychological
bond – here, Graham’s technique involves attempting to put himself into
the mind of his target, and Lecktor believes the agent’s success indicates
psychopathic tendencies, kept in check by the routines of work and everyday
family life.
Apparently
agreeing with Lecktor, Mann creates a vivid sense of ambiguity around
Graham – he visits Lecktor in his all-white, hyper-modern cell (just one
of the numerous areas where Manhunter’s clinical realism scores
over the camp gothic of Lambs), and in most shots it’s hard to
tell which of the two men is behind bars and which is free - if either.
Not for nothing does Will live in a coastal town called ‘Captiva,’ and
the movie starts and ends with references to the cages he’s built
with his son on the sand to protect incoming sea-turtles. Leaving Lecktor’s
cell, he suffers a panic attack and hurtles down endless flights of gleaming-white
stairs, only recovering his composure outside in the open air. But this
promising psychological aspect – it’s in many ways the gimmick
on which the film turns – isn’t especially well developed by Mann’s script,
an adaptation of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. We’re told that Graham
spent time in a psychiatric institution after being attacked by Lecktor,
but there’s no real sense of his see-sawing between normality and any
kind of psychopathic state, though this is perhaps a fault of Petersen’s
hyper-restrained blank of a performance.
As
it is, Will’s empathic skills aren’t especially different from countless
other screen detectives – his methods of deduction seem to owe as much
to Sherlock Holmes as to Freud or Jung. And it’s as an intriguingly original
thriller that Manhunter works best. While The Keep’s
sloppily erratic plotting made for a stilted viewing experience, here
Mann’s control is assured. The killer doesn’t appear until almost an hour
in - we stay with the Will Graham side of the investigation. The second
half of the movie alternates between the two sides, allowing Tom Noonan
to create a rounded – perhaps almost sympathetic – serial killer character.
We’re not sure how to react when he gets to know Reba, a blind co-worker,
and, in a surprising display of kindness, enables her to have an unusual
sensory experience – which this review won’t reveal, but which is connected
with Dollarhyde’s otherwise-underdeveloped William Blake fixation.
And
while in most directors’ hands the introduction of Reba might have signalled
a sentimental or schmaltzy detour, Mann integrates her within Manhunter’s
network of ‘sight’ references. Will has to put himself where the killer
stood – just as the audience is forced to do with the opening subjective-camera
shots – to get into his mind. When he makes the vital leap of imagination
that enables him to track down the killer, he says, “Everything with you
is seeing, isn’t it? Your primary sensory intake that makes your
dreams live.” Manhunter’s heightened visuals represent just this
kind of ‘living dream’ – and Mann’s attention to colour makes Steven Soderbergh’s
experiments in The Limey, Out of Sight, The Underneath
and Traffic seem blunderingly amateurish. There’s a seemingly throwaway
moment when Will’s plane is about to land, and we see, in the distance,
the sky shading through infinite gradations of colour, from deep night
black to bright gold of the dawn – suggesting the difference between Will
and Lecktor, or between any of us, is a matter of degree, not of type.
The
climactic imperilment of a blind character isn’t the only apparently ‘cheap’
trick Mann gets away with. In most movies, relentless pounding music on
the soundtrack detracts – here, it blends brilliantly with Dante Spinotti’s
glowing cinematography. Mann even pulls off the apparently impossible
task of putting a song over a sex scene, though the closing anthem ‘Heartbeat’
pushes things a little too far. Then again, this is the world Graham has
chosen – the banality of bad shirts, faceless supermarkets, MOR ballads
on the radio. He’s turned away from Lecktor’s blinding-white extremity,
the timelessness of insanity, and located himself within his own place
and time. An era of nasty suits, pounding synths, bad hair and a surfeit
of Florida style. The era, in fact, of Miami Vice - the world Mann
made.
5th
February, 2001
by Neil Young
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