Hannibal Conquers

Mads Mikkelsen stands like a dancer.  To be honest, I now know that he is, or rather was, exactly that.  I've just read a brief interview online.  From that I learned that he was a gymnast and professional dancer.  I even watched him dance in some obscure music video for some forgettable pop tune.  (One other delightfully irrelevant snippet of biographical information gleaned from that interview, he met his wife, a gorgeous choreographer named Hanne Jacobsen, when he was on the line -- in drag -- in La Cage aux Folles.  Loved that.  Wish there'd been pictures.)  That he was a dancer explained something I'd noticed watching him play the eponymous Hannibal, in the exquisitely realized television prequel to Thomas Harris' novel, Red Dragon.  Mads Mikkelsen has heavy hands.  It's something I noticed in male dancers back when I knew a few in college.  Their hands tend to hang.  There's nothing ugly about it.  Perfectly natural, that a person's hands should just hang there when not in use.  Actually, like nearly everything else about him, Mads Mikkelsen's hands are quite beautiful: strong, long and lean, beautifully balanced.  An actor's hands can be fidgety; always after business, even if it's just being thrust awkwardly into a pocket.  Dancers seem to know something most actors have to learn; how to be still.  Mads Mikkelsen knows how to be still.  Look at his hands.  Fits.

He is a quite beautiful man.  That doesn't square with the character we know.  But then, there's something a little off-putting in how pretty he is.  There is an almost too perfect symmetry to Mikkelsen's face and form, so that full on, face forward, all that sharp bone, all those broad plains, squared shoulders and straight long length of limb can make him look almost weirdly... even, like someone standing with his nose too close to the line of intersection of two mirrors.  Look closer though and there's one long lid lower over one lovely eye, and the pretty mouth twists a bit when he speaks.  And, again like a dancer, he makes angles, standing or sitting; his postures are dynamic, still but not static, one shoulder leads, or a knee, his head tilts away from a level gaze, his chin drifts up when he listens.

I'm probably talking the most awful nonsense about all of this, I know, but I must admit, I've been studying him.  What I particularly noticed, watching the whole first season of the new television show at a go, was the way this new Hannibal Lector stands still, the way he sits, and yes, the way his hands hang.

In his playing Hannibal Lecter, there is a a deliciously subtle theatricality, a studied, balletic economy of movement to the way he delicately adjusts the parsley or wipes a spot of au juice from the edge of serving dish.  This can be wryly funny -- considering what the audience has been led to believe is likely to be on the  menu. It isn't overdone.  It doesn't look camp.  Instead, I'm reminded of watching Chaplin, another great dancer, playing his Bluebeard, Monsieur Verdoux, as he measures out a length of rope or tops up his wife's Bordeaux with a dram of poison.  It's all precise, even elegant rather than prissy.

You will remember that in the 1991 film, The Silence of the Lambs, when we first see the great Anthony Hopkins' Dr. Lector, he is standing stock-still in his cell, ramrod straight, his hands at rest at his sides.  He does not blink.  (His first recorded gesture, wonderfully, is to lick a finger and smile before turning the page of the survey he's been asked to read.)  Throughout the first half or better of the film, indeed until and even in the middle of that final, brutal burst of ferocity when Lecter kills his guards, Hopkins, when not actually restrained, barely moves.  Instead,  his performance relies on the Jonathan Demme's shockingly intimate close-ups, his face a mad sort of mask.  And then there's the great British actor's traditional first-fiddle; that rich and wildly various voice.  With that exceptional instrument, Hopkins makes the most beautiful music; from the low, lulling familiarity of a whispering lover, to the bombastic and implacable command of the megalomaniac.  It is an indelible performance; a study in economy and at the same time, the most perfect, delicious ham.  I've watched the movie a dozen times, at least.  It is the greatest American horror film since The Exorcist, one of the greatest of all time, and Hopkins created the greatest film monster since Christopher Lee's Dracula.

When the slick promos for the new television show started last Fall, I was dubious, at least in part, because of my loyalty to Hopkins' performance.  I've read all of Harris' novels.  I enjoyed all the Lecter novels, good and bad.  I may be one of the few people who actually enjoyed the way the novelist, if alas, not the filmmakers, resolved the story of Lecter and Clarice.  I watched all the movie sequels too. That last movie, without Hopkins -- what was it called?  Little Hannibal and How He Grew? Hannibal Riesling? Anyway, that one all but proved it -- the wonderful Brian Cox in Manhunter aside -- Hannibal Lector was Hopkins' forever after.  Pretty was not the point.  Gaspard Ulliel was and is quite a handsome little fellow, but as the young Hannibal Lector, he was about as frightening as pretty little Ben Whishaw in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which is to say, not at all (and Ben Whishaw, bless him, can at least act.)

I already knew Mads Mikkelsen from at least two very good movies, Casino Royale and Flame and Citron, and two not very good ones: a disappointing The Three Musketeers from 2011, in which he at least was well cast as Rochefort, and a wonderful, hot-mess of a Norse epic, Valhalla Rising, in which Mikkelsen played a warrior rather unimaginatively if accurately named "One Eye", from 2009.  A pretty varied resume -- except for the weird recurrence of eye-trouble (A patch as Rochefort in the Musketeers, the aforesaid singularity in the epic, and a milky eye that teared blood in the James Bond outing.  Strange, but maybe some instinctive attempt to break up that beautiful, uncanny face of his.)

None of this however led me to expect much good to come from his casting as Lecter, for the reasons explained above. Frankly, I thought it a little mad for anyone to take up the role after Hopkins laid it down.  The idea of a television version seemed specially foolhardy.  Weekly Lector?  How was that supposed to work?  Hopkins, in the three movies combined, probably logged less screen-time than any famous monster in film history since the cat in Val Lewton's Cat People.  Hannibal is as much remembered and referenced as seen, even in Harris' novels.  Best way, really, with monsters.  Worked for Bram Stroker too.  Too much with us and the monster descends from the supernatural to the merely grotesque, or worse, the ridiculous -- think Godzilla.

Hopkins was 54 when he first played Lector, 65 by 2002's Red Dragon.  Despite a rather obvious girdle and a lot more makeup, Sir Anthony was frankly too old that last time.  (He was not helped by that horrible short ponytail in the flashbacks.)  Didn't matter.  Even if his portrayal had gone a bit too camp by then, Hopkins still was Hannibal and it was good to see him again.  Remember, Brian Cox was only 40 when his Hannibal premiered in 1984's Manhunter.  Mikkelsen's 48.  There's hint of grey at his temples, and the lighting and the color tends to emphasize every little wrinkle at the corners of  his eyes, but he does seem considerably younger than either of the British knights.

So how has he done it, this lovely young Dutchman, how has he won my heart, as it were, playing Hannibal Lector?

First, there's Bryan Fuller, of course.  His show is gorgeous, beautifully shot and designed to a fare-thee-well.   His premise is clever, setting his show before Lector is caught, everything moving toward that known point.  The writing is clever in so far as it satisfies the viewer already familiar with the material without sacrificing episodic narrative just to set off fan reactions.  He's a clever, clever fellow.   The overly elaborate, invariably ritual murders are absurd, but nightmarish rather than silly, and always framed within the already exaggerated, not to say gothic unreality of Harris' original fantasy.  (Unlike Demme or Manhunter's Michael Mann, Fuller, like Harris, is all on the side of the monsters.  Maybe it's the liberation of not answering to either the expectations of a cinema audience or a movie studio, but there is no bright corner in this tale, the FBI being just one more saturated blue basement here, and no heroes, only contesting crackpots of varying mental and moral instability and attractiveness, sometimes from episode to episode, or even scene to scene.)  I am by no means a Fuller fanboy, but I do think he's found the perfect playground here for all his most harmlessly macabre preoccupations, and without that rather cloying note of life-affirming whimsy that tried so desperately to win our hearts in early ventures, shows I did nonetheless enjoy, like Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies.

And then there's Hugh Dancy in his underpants!

Don't know why I didn't mention this before.

Hugh Dancy in his underpants!  Pretty much every episode, Hugh Dancy, as "special investigator, Will Graham," wanders helplessly dreaming into the road, onto the roof, into the woods, in his night-dress, i.e. a tight T-shirt and boxers so snug they might as well be briefs.  And he sweats.  He sweats a lot.

Sweet.

Hugh Dancy is actually a charming and accomplished young actor, and really, it's his show.  As written, he's as close as Fuller comes to a hero here -- better say, protagonist -- but the character is beyond a mess.  Every week, Dancy has to act up a storm of crazy, sick, hallucinating, furious, perverse, murderous, goodness.  That he does so episode after episode, and with the like of the now truly Wagnerian, not to say Wellesian Laurence Fishburne as his nominal boss, "special agent in charge, Jack Crawford," is a credit to both actors.  (And remember, at least once an episode, Dancy has to do this, in an American accent, in his underpants, often as not with either a pack of rescued dogs around him, or with a CGI stag ((don't ask.  It works.)))

Truth be told?  Any other show, I'd watch just for Hugh Dancy the hot somnambulist.  That said, none of this rich, atmospheric, meaty goodness would work were it not for the cold dark heart at the center of it all, Mads Mikkelsen's Hannibal Lector.  Without this actor as that character, this would basically be just a rococo CSI: Baltimore.  (It is a mark of Fuller's hit and miss style of arch, television-generation-nostalgia that his most recent, other broadcast project was the well intentioned mess, Mockingbird Lane.  Didn't see it?  I did.  It was The Munsters without the comic wonder that was Fred Gwynne.  Barely made it through the pilot before that one got shit-canned.  Jerry O'Connell is a dear -- and I certainly wouldn't mind watching him wandering around in his underwear, but Fred Gwynne can rest in peace.  Herman Munster is not to be duplicated.  Casting is all, people.)

Mikkelsen has been given a nearly impossible task here.  Without betraying either Harris' original monster, or our all too vivid recollection of the supreme achievement of Hopkins' screen incarnation, this television Lector has to believably occupy the same psychic space in a much smaller frame.  Fuller had the genius to see that he could, by being so beautifully still in the midst of all this lugubrious mayhem.  Here, the mask is all.  Hopkins could wrinkle and wink and fill the screen with huge, mad eyes.  The preeminent voice of his theatrical generation, he could use every villainous tone, every sibilant hiss and fast fall from high to low, from intimacy to indecency, to convey both the depth of the character's depravity and his command of the stage, even in a straight-jacket and hockey-mask, while strapped to a dolly.  Mikkelsen's is the voice of calm reason here.  Everywhere around him there is a truly theatrical madness; blasting shotguns and flayed flesh, bloody shock and violent weirdness. He must compete for our attention with voices as rich as Fishburne's thunder, and as plaintive as Dancy's thready tenor, perpetually at the point of snapping.  It is Hannibal, wonderfully, who is really the way in for us, the quiet voice we trust, the calm presence who makes us dinner.

It simply wouldn't work with anyone less physically confident, less supremely commanding in every scene.  It does work because of the placidity of that pretty face, that handsome mask, tilting back just enough that we get a glimpse, here and there, of those empty eyes.

(One last bit of perfect casting to mention.  In an original twist, there is the equally pale presence of the reliable Gillian Anderson in a recurring role as Lector's own mysterious shrink, the delightfully named "Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier."  Her scenes with Mikkelsen are studies in underplaying to the point of almost suspended animation.)

Because this is Bryan Fuller's show, it is also about the gayest thing on television now.  I dearly love the truly lunatic fun of Ryan Murphy's nut-bar treat, American Horror Story. But in addition to all the aquarium colors, and the set-decorated kills, what Fuller's show has over the most obvious competition for the title is (wait for it)  the best gay love triangle on TV.  Fishburne's big, withholding FBI daddy is actually something of a stalking horse here, but the overtly sexual satisfaction Mikkelsen's Hannibal takes in stealing the troubled, juvenile beauty, Dancy from him is an almost pornographic pleasure.  Remember how good-looking these three actors are, (and rather sadly, how predictably negligible the female competition,) and Fuller's less than subtle suggestion of something queer down Quantico-way makes Hannibal, the television version, something to watch in the dark for reasons other than aesthetics or chills.  Every time Fishburne pushes Darcy "beyond his limits" at a crime-scene, there's a sadism to it more redolent of leather than forensics.  Darcy's poor Will turns invariably to Mikkelsen's Hannibal for comfort right after.  Hell, the boy faints dead away more than once, only to awake all but in the arms of his dangerous, dancing doctor.

The show has been renewed for a second season.  I can't wait.  When we last left him, poor Will was in a dungeon.  Hannibal was even allowed a wicked little smile, from the other side of the bars.