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Silence of the Lambs

I recently read the original Thomas Harris novel, Silence of the Lambs, after having seen the movie probably a dozen times over the years.  It reminded me of seeing the LotR movie, after I'd read the books 3 or 4 times. In both cases, I spent much more time just mentally cataloguing the differences between them than actually watching/reading and enjoying the material.

Silence of the Lambs, the movie, was remarkably faithful to the book.  Dozens of lines of dialogue were directly lifted from the book; many of the best ones, in fact.  The screenplay was also expertly adapted, since virtually every change in the movie was an improvement on what was in the book, and things that were glossed over in the movie were things that the book described in more detail than we really needed to know.  The description of Hannibal's room in the asylum was dumb in the book, with bars and some sort of nylon screen keeping him back from it.  I couldn't visualize it; I imagined like a giant pantyhose sort of material blocking him off.  The Shamo pool plexiglass in the movie was much more effective and logical.

I did like in the book seeing a bit of Hannibal after he escaped.  And there was some more reality in him having to disguise himself.  (He's described in a plastic surgery hospital, wearing a big nose bandage, not from surgery, just for disguise, and he's there since he won't look out of place with that on his face. It's absurd in the movie(s) that he can roam around with no disguise at all, and no one recognizes him, when he'd be on all of those America's Most Wanted shows every week, covers of every tabloid, etc.

The book had more long dialogue than I can recall reading outside of a screenplay, and it was at times hard to follow who was saying what.  It's always harder to read dialogue and follow it than it is to hear it spoken.  So the long orations Hannibal gives when talking to Clarice were often hard to grasp the full nuances or menace or intimidation of.  Things that are abundantly clear in the film, with Hopkins' surpassing performance.

However since 95% of the dialogue in the book is replicated almost exactly in the film, I found myself hearing Hopkins saying the lines, which I know more or less by heart after seeing the oh-so-memorable film so many times, and I would just hear the scene as it was in film, rather than actually going by the words on the page.

I think I have to give the film praise, since it was an interesting book but nothing all that amazing.  I wouldn't have found it very remarkable as anything more than a slightly more literate than normal horror story.  While the film is amazingly good, elevated far above the quality of most movies, and certainly above that of horror films, which are by and large dreck.