I went to see Hannibal Rising last Friday, its opening day. I saw it at the 12:45 showing, which had more to do with the fact that I am unemployed and needed the matinée prices than it did with my eagerness to see the movie.

The early afternoon crowd was rather interesting. It was older than I would have expected, especially for a psychological thriller / horror movie such as this. Most interesting was the elderly woman down front who crocheted through the whole movie.

The Hannibal Lecter films now number four. Silence of the Lambs was first, of course. It came out in 1991 and won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress. Hannibal came out ten years later, followed by Red Dragon the following year. Hannibal Rising, the fourth in the series, is actually the first chronologically. It tells the story of the young Hannibal Lecter from his childhood in Eastern Europe during World War II and his subsequent years in medical school in France.

It turns out Hannibal is from Lithuania. Never mind the fact that no Lithuanian in the history of the world has ever named his child Hannibal. It is not a Lithuanian name. It is a Semitic name, although I couldn’t imagine even a Litvak naming their child Hannibal. Of course, the name was chosen long before the back story of him in Lithuania was written, the name being chosen because it rhymed with cannibal.

[Please note: the rest of this post contains spoilers about Hannibal Rising. Do not read on if you don’t want to know things about the plot.]

It would be easy to pick apart the movie for errors about Lithuania. In addition to the problem with the name, the Lecter Castle in Lithuania was made out of cut stone, whereas unfinished stone and brick were used in Lithuania. I could also point out the fact that most forests in Lithuania are birch, unlike the ones in the movie. But I won’t point out such problems (other than in this paragraph).

Hannibal Rising has more in common with Hannibal than with the other two films. Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon have Hannibal in prison helping a detective to solve a murder, where as this movie focuses on Hannibal’s crimes.

The problem is that the Hannibal in Hannibal Rising is not consistent with the Hannibal in Hannibal. In the latter film, Hannibal’s motive is different. He always kills because the person deserves it. He is, in fact, doing society a favor. In Hannibal he has a pedophile mutilate himself, he kills an detective who is chasing him only for money, and he injures one of Clarice’s superiors who treats Clarice with disrespect. The beauty of Hannibal’s monstrosity, of course, is that the punishment he inflicts on the victim is often out of proportion with the victim’s shortcomings. There is a certain poetic justice to Hannibal killing a Baltimore Symphony Orchestra violin player and feeding him to unknowing members of the BSO board of directors in Red Dragon. But Hannibal kills him for playing poorly. Hannibal does society a favor in this case, but his means are rather disproportionate.

In this respect, Hannibal serves as an interesting commentary on most of us, albeit a greatly exaggerated one. Many time, we justify our actions by saying that the end justifies the means. But how often are the means unethical, regardless of the validity of the ends? And how often do we do things for selfish reasons while claiming altruistic motives? There is a wonderful smugness to Hannibal Lecter, especially in Hannibal, and it is portrayed exquisitely by Anthony Hopkins.

The problem with Hannibal Rising is that the motives for his killing are much more mundane. Most of them stem from nothing more than revenge. Although the killing of the butcher does remove a boorish character from society, he is killed primarily because he has insulted Hannibal’s aunt. This murder is the one closest to killings in the other films. The rest are merely revenge killings for the murder of Hannibal’s younger sister by soldiers during World War II.

They had a chance to maintain the integrity of Hannibal’s character in this film. After all, no one can deny the benefit to society of the removal of war criminals. If the writers had Hannibal going after a number of war criminals, his character would have been much stronger. The butcher is, in fact, a war criminal, but that plays little role in Hannibal’s decision to kill him. The men who killed Hannibal’s sister are monsters, and if the writers had focused on Hannibal’s desire to remove them from society, it would have been a stronger movie. As it is, it just comes off as a boy out for revenge.

By the way, when Hannibal kills the soldier in the forest in Lithuania, he cuts some wild mushrooms and cooks a with them and the face of the soldier. This is a very Lithuanian thing to do. Wild mushrooms are a staple of Lithuanian cooking and they are plentiful in the forests.

Overall, I give the movie a C+. They had a great character to work with but didn’t flesh him out well (pardon the pun). I think it is telling that a film as silly as Norbit (which opened the same day) took in over twice as much the first weekend.

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