The Weekly Gravy #26

As I write this, Kansas City is not only feeling the cold from the latest polar vortex (it won’t get above 20° F for at least a week!) but from the Super Bowl, which went about as badly as that time I tried to eat Cheetos whilst driving. But that’s a story for another time. Right now, let’s turn our attention to something infinitely more uplifting…

The Sparks Brothers (2021) – ****

In a post I wrote over two years ago, I made a case for why I consider Sparks my favorite band:

… they embrace their own audacity without being self-conscious about [it]. Absurd as the subject matter of their songs may be, they aren’t winking at you; they treat that subject with absolute sincerity, the result being not just rich and strange but an active joy to listen to.

In that same post, I talked about how Edgar Wright and Leos Carax were both working on films with Sparks – or should I say the Mael brothers, who are Sparks, after all? – and while Carax’ film, Annette, is completed but still awaiting release, Wright’s film has premiered at Sundance, and I was able to stream it via the festival’s website. In that post, I suggested his film would be mainly a concert film with some archival material to provide context for those who weren’t familiar with them. Quite the opposite.

Sparks, as I mentioned in that old post, have been around for half a century, putting out 25 albums and around 300 songs in that time, experiencing multiple cycles of success and obscurity, changing their musical style multiple times, and what Wright’s film does is carefully, lovingly trace that journey, using not only an absolute wealth of archival material, but present-day interviews with the Maels and a wide array of colleagues and big-name fans (some real surprises among them), and a mix of 2-D and stop-motion animation to bring some of the reminiscences to life.

The result is an absolute joy to behold, for the wonderful, wonderful music we hear throughout (if you’re not a Sparks fan going in, you ought to be coming out), for Wright’s palpable enthusiasm and skill (this is an unquestionable labor of love), and for the sheer high spirit of the whole enterprise, embodied by the Maels themselves, who come off as immensely likable, surprisingly down-to-earth fellows; Russell the perennially youthful, slightly overripe semi-parodic front-man, and Ron, the wiry, dryly witty songwriter and keyboardist, whose appearance and attitude suggest nothing so much as a deranged accountant.

The film makes the point (perhaps once too often) that the Maels have achieved such creative longevity through their willingness to continue evolving creatively and their devotion to their own vision; they’ve never really sold out, never chosen to milk their success in a given musical vein, always embraced their periods of success but never compromised for the sake of extending or regaining them. It also makes the slightly bitter point that, despite being born-and-bred Californians, the Maels have always found greater success in Europe, to the point were many assumed they were British.

But the acknowledgements of disappointment and tragedy – as when the Maels reflect on the sudden death of their father – don’t darken the story too much, nor does the lack of personal turbulence (or personal information – by the film’s end you still know very little about Ron or Russell themselves) make one long for more drama; the real engine of the story is their creative journey, rooted in their unflagging passion for their music and their unvaried trust in each other. Ron acknowledges that he can hardly imagine working without Russell; they are, in a way, the Coens of the musical world, but even more joined at the hip.

It’s also worth noting that – fitting, given it’s an Edgar Wright film – it’s one of the funniest films I’ve seen in a long while. Multiple moments had me laughing at loud, with Ron’s dry one-liners (“Times change”) being especially hilarious; the story of how the band got its name is also a prime example of corporate inanity. At 135 minutes, it drags just a bit at times, and the last 10 minutes or so seem to spin their wheels in an onslaught of praise for the Maels (I would rather, say, have seen more of their recent concerts), but the sum total is so much fun, so loving and inventive and in keeping with the spirit of Sparks itself, that I have to embrace it.

And I can’t fucking wait for Annette.

Score: 92

Nomadland (2020) – ****

If you’ve been following my posts on the current awards season, Nomadland has been one of the heaviest hitters throughout, with Chloe Zhao winning a mountain of awards for her direction and a number more for her script and editing, Joshua James Richards winning numerous awards for his cinematography, the film itself winning not a few awards for Best Picture, and Frances McDormand winning ample awards for Best Actress in a rather competitive year. That’s a lot for any film to live up to, and I’ve been burned before – not least by my own expectations – when seeing a film anointed by others; their praise, fairly or not, places a chip on the film’s shoulder I’m all too ready to flick off.

But Nomadland, even if it’s not my own #1 of the year – as of this writing, it’s my #3 – is a damn good film, and even if there are films I praise more, I get why it’s earned so many plaudits. And that’s really what matters. It may have taken me a few scenes to fully get into it, but before long…I got it. It might’ve helped that I got to see it in IMAX, with Richards’ images spread across a mammoth canvas and the sound enveloping me so completely that I wasn’t sure where the sounds in the (mostly empty theater) ended and those on the soundtrack began. But then again, how we respond to a film depends on so many variables – our mood, the time of day, other members of the audience – that there’s no good reason to asterisk my praise for it. It impressed me, and that’s all there is to it.

It’s the story of Fern (Frances McDormand), who had lived and worked in the town of Empire, Nevada, a town so dependent on the local gypsum mine that, when the mine closed, the town died within a few months. Fern stayed on for a time, even after the death of her husband, but as the film begins she’s packing up and setting off in her van to make a circuit of her various seasonal jobs, and the film follows her through at least a couple of these year-long cycles; she works in an Amazon warehouse, at Badlands National Park, and at the Wall Drug Store, she attends a convention of fellow nomads (led by real-life nomad guru Bob Wells, playing himself), and she spends time with her sister Dolly (Melissa Smith) and fellow nomad Dave (David Strathairn), both of whom are willing to give her a more permanent place to stay.

But Fern resists, and one of the film’s strengths is that it never treats her as a problem to be solved. She has, near the end, a monologue where she touches on some of her personal regrets, but otherwise we simply are shown – not told – that she has always valued her freedom, has always craved that sense of limitlessness that the open road affords. It’s not the easiest way to live, and the film shows that – one of the first scenes shows her squatting by a wire fence, and her visit to Dolly is prompted by her van’s breaking down – but it’s the way she wants to live, because that’s the way she’s wired. At one point a friend’s daughter asks if she’s homeless, and she replies, “I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?” The daughter doesn’t seem totally convinced, but Fern doesn’t need to convince anyone, and that includes the viewer.

It probably helps if you’ve lived some part of the life depicted here. I wouldn’t relish the nomadic lifestyle (I’m 31 and I’ve spent 25 of those years at two addresses), but Fern’s experiences at work resonated with me strongly; I work in shipping and nodded in recognition when they mention the “three points of contact” safety protocol, just as I cringed in sympathy when Fern has to clean vomit off a toilet seat. I’ve been there, and the film rings as true in those moments as I presume it does in showing the travails of nomadic life, the loneliness one moment and the camaraderie the next. It’s a deeply sympathetic film.

Zhao’s direction has rightfully been praised (her writing and editing are also effective); as in The Rider she displays her gift for directing real people, basically playing themselves, so that they avoid the self-consciousness often found in non-professional performers. You’ve got Linda May the friendly mentor, Swankie the poignantly crotchety firebrand, Wells the folksy spokesman for the lifestyle, and a host of others, all of whom feel quite real, open in the way people open up when they feel at ease, guarded in the way people are when they have to put up just a bit of a front to survive.

And the two name actors in the cast are the kind to slip into their roles and play them as people, not characters; McDormand embodies Fern’s kindness and warmth as well as the arm’s length she keeps between herself and others; she embodies the confidence and doubt, the acceptance of uncertainty and the pursuit of freedom, and she does so with great skill and grace. Strathairn, meanwhile, is able to hint at the complexities of Dave’s past and his love for Fern without ever spelling any of it out; indeed, we get the feeling that Dave isn’t too good at expressing himself even when he ought to, which is why he gave the nomadic lifestyle a shot in the first place.

Richards’ cinematography is wonderful, not just in the glorious landscape shots, many shot during the “magic hour,” but in scenes like those where Fern looks at her old pictures by lamplight, alone in the darkness with her memories. If Ludovico Einaudi’s music were written for the film, it would easily be among the best scores of the year; his lovely, restrained piano melodies perfectly fit the material, and in one of the film’s best moments they’re blended on the soundtrack with a folk song being performed by some younger nomads. It’s the kind of simple, beautiful moment that sums up why the film works as well as it does.

Score: 91

The Little Things (2021) – ***

I’d considered seeing The Little Things after reading a fairly positive review of it on IndieWire, and the Globe nomination for Jared Leto (followed by a SAG nomination this morning) was enough to send me to the theater. Ironically, while Leto’s performance wasn’t anything to make a fuss over, the film itself I found a solid-enough thriller, a film originally written in the early 90s, set in 1990, and reminiscent of the era’s style. It’s not great by any means, it’s morally dubious, and you don’t need to see it, but for casual afternoon viewing, it’s reasonably satisfying.

Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) is a sheriff’s deputy in Kern County, California, who’s sent to Los Angeles to retrieve some evidence which might prove helpful in a Kern County case. Deke is reluctant to go because he’d left L.A. (he was an LASD detective) under a cloud some years earlier, but he goes, and finds himself bumping into familiar faces – and rubbing the new star of the Homicide department, Det. Jim Baxter (Rami Malek), the wrong way. Baxter, hearing about Deke’s reputation, invites him to check out a local crime scene, and Deke recognizes the hallmarks of a killer he pursued years earlier, but never caught.

Deke decides to stay in L.A. for a while and help Baxter with the case, and after some digging lands on appliance repairman Albert Sparma (Leto) as the prime suspect. His strange behavior only deepens Deke’s suspicions, and after he’s brought in for questioning, his evasive, mocking manner makes him Baxter’s prime suspect as well. But they lack any firm evidence to link him to the crimes, and begin to stake him out…setting off an obsession like the one which ultimately drove Deke out of L.A. all those years ago.

Setting aside the question of Sparma’s guilt or innocence, the ostensible appeal of Leto’s performance is his portrayal of a man who might be a murderer, and who you want to be the murderer. The most effective part of the performance is the physicality of it; Leto grows (or wears) a pot belly, stringy long hair, and a shaggy beard, and affects a loping walk. He also keeps his eyes wide, speaks in a vaguely nasal drawl, and generally behaves like that kid you knew in middle and/or high school who loved to dick around and tell fucked-up stories (that were probably total bullshit) with a straight face, only middle-aged. It’s not an especially great performance (not like his work in Blade Runner 2049), and he’s actually not in the film all that much, but he’s fine. Just not worthy of awards nominations.

Neither, to be sure, are Washington or Malek, but they do typically solid work. Washington is an inherently compelling actor to watch, and he shows how Deke’s laid-back charm conceals a considerable amount of inner turmoil. Malek, meanwhile, makes good use of his tired eyes and capacity for playing tightly-wound, haunted characters (five years ago, Jake Gyllenhaal might’ve played the role) to show how the case begins to eat Baxter alive. And there are solid supporting turns from Michael Hyatt, Chris Bauer, and Charlie Saxton in the crime-thriller-ensemble tradition.

The film is technically quite solid, with John Lee Hancock showing rather more verve behind the camera than usual (it helps that he wrote the script – he seems to have more investment in the story and characters than he did in the baity biopics I’ve seen from him), John Schwartzman providing some nice noir-ish cinematography (there’s a scene where Deke is alone in his room, dwelling on the past, that’s especially impressive), Thomas Newman writing quite a solid score, and Robert Frazen doing some genuinely effective editing, especially in how he weaves in the flashbacks which show how Deke came to leave L.A. in the first place.

It’s Hancock’s script that keeps the film from rising up into the low ***½ range; it’s too generic, a bit too self-consciously averse to answering our questions, and in the end, especially by today’s standards, too willing to let its LEO characters off the hook for their actions. A better director and/or writer could’ve mitigated this by playing up the moral ambiguities at play more effectively, but we’re talking about the man who made a film that more or less let Ray Kroc off the hook for fucking over the McDonald brothers. He’s certainly not the kind of director or writer to admit that feeling guilty isn’t punishment enough for such sins. Not anymore.

Score: 74

Asparagus (1979) – ***½

If I wanted to be cute (who am I kidding, I’m adorable), I’d describe Asparagus as the film Frida Kahlo and Maya Deren never collaborated on. And if I wanted to ground my opinion of it in fact rather than hypothesis, I’d mention that it was paired with Eraserhead theatrically and say they suit each other well. And if I wanted to review it in my normal fashion…well, I’m not quite sure where to begin.

Where do you begin with a film that has a faceless woman shitting two asparagus spears into a toilet, which give rise to several more spears that spell out the title? And the film isn’t remotely done reflecting on the symbolic potential of asparagus, as the phallic connotations of this particular vegetable are unmistakably illustrated. To quote director (and Kansas City native!) Suzan Pitt:

I had a garden where I grew Asparagus from seed – it’s a very primitive vegetable going back to the time of the dinosaurs. It comes out of the ground as a phallic stalk, pointy and purple green, the essence of a beautiful masculine form. But then as summer passes it stretches tall and becomes a delicate fern, seen on roadsides tilting in the wind, the essence of the feminine like long strands of tangled hair in the breeze.  I thought of it as a beautiful symbol of sexuality. 

Pitt’s website

If you’d never thought of asparagus in that way before, I can hardly blame you, but the film is very much an expression of a personal symbology, and – as Pitt’s own words on the film, linked above, confirm – it serves to illustrate, in its surreal manner, how the artist takes in the world, filtered through the prism of their selfhood, and presents it to the audience, who ultimately must make of it what they will.

The first half and coda of the film are done with two-dimensional animation, but much of the second half makes use of stop-motion animation to depict the theatre where the woman – still depicted via 2D animation – opens a satchel full of…sensations, I guess you’d say? Psychic impressions? Whatever you call them, they are sent forth across the 3D audience using 2D art, illustrating in a neat way the gulf betwixt art and its beholders.

The coda has the woman returning to her home, removing a mask she has worn into public, stripping down, and going into her garden where she – with a head devoid of features beyond a mouth – fellates a stalk of asparagus, which transforms several times before reverting to its standard form. Perhaps an illustration for how the artist transforms reality via their perceptions?

But being as surreal a work as it is, and having a number of elements I haven’t yet touched upon, it’s not a cop-out to say that Asparagus is as much a pure experience, a pure piece of visual imagination, as it is a work to be interpreted. On that level, it’s generally quite impressive, with striking, sometimes unsettling images; I mentioned Kahlo and the depiction of the woman’s home and especially her garden echoes her work strongly. And the blending of two- and three-dimensional animation is truly stunning to behold. I could say more about the animation of the woman herself – she moves in the stiff, uncanny-valley manner of, say, a Winsor McCay character – but all in all Pitt created a feast for the eyes.

And Richard Teitelbaum’s score, a series of hypnotic electronic drones (the musical equivalent of being in an empty, brightly lit building in the middle of the night), is the perfect accompaniment to the flow of Pitt’s images, ensuring that the feast extends to the ears as well. Given how asparagus is depicted here, however, it’s just as well the nose and tongue were left out of it. Definitely worth seeking out for animation buffs. (Though, unless I really hate a film or find it a bore, don’t I tend to say most films are worth seeing?)

Score: 84

Spring Night Summer Night (1967) – ****

It’s a long shadow for a little film, made 50 years ago and barely released (as an exploitation film with the title Miss Jessica is Pregnant) before falling into utter obscurity for decades, to cast: that such a film could be so strongly reflected both in Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Hillbilly Elegy, both of which have received more press in the last year than Night has received in the last 50. But the former distinctly echoes it in subject and style, and the latter (one close echo aside) feels like a botched attempt to show the side of American society this film depicts so effectively.

Right away, we learn that the Royers are an unhappy family. Eldest son Carl (Ted Heimerdinger) is restless and destructive, practicing his shooting with the headlights of his father’s tractor. His father, Virgil (John Crawford), is the kind of man who petulantly demands the kind of respect he’ll never receive. His half-sister Jessie (Larue Hall) ignores her mother Mae (Marjorie Johnson) when she passive-aggressively asks for the salt at the dinner, and when Carl petulantly retrieves it (still in its Morton’s canister) Mae chides him for saying “damn”; quietly toxic behavior can be tolerated, but not profanity. Meanwhile, Grandma (Isabel Stott) is off by herself, watching TV with the volume cranked up.

There’s a badly-directed scene in Elegy where the Vances get a new dog which runs wild around the house, and it came to mind in the scene where Virgil ducks out of taking Mae into town to go dancing (a nod to the disconnect in their marriage) so he can take part in a cockfight, and he lets his prize rooster scurry around the room, amusing himself and the younger children and terrifying Mae, until Carl gets ahold of it. And then an oblivious Grandma pokes her head in and asks who’ll take her to her revival meeting. Here, the chaos feels like that of real life. We then head into town – the rundown town of Canaan, Ohio – and into one of the local honkytonks, where we get a feel for the townsfolk; the older folks who sit in silence and sip their beers, and the younger people who live it up as much as they can. Some of them might leave Canaan for bigger and better things; Carl longs to, and urges Jessie to join him. But others will have fun tonight and resume the cycle of drudgery in the morning.

We already have an idea of Carl’s repressed feelings for Jessie, and when he sees her dancing with a handsy boy, he intervenes, nearly starting a brawl. Jessie runs out, and Carl follows in his car; he catches up to her, grabs her, and shoves her into the car. They have an argument we see but cannot hear. Then we cut to Jessie lying on the ground, looking up at the sky. Then we see her walking away, and pan to Carl pulling his pants up. There’s no doubt as to what has happened. And that’s the spring night.

Then we cut to several months later, as Carl hitchhikes back home after spending the interim in Columbus, without telling the family when or why he left. Jessie is visibly pregnant, and Virgil has been running all over town, making a fool of himself trying to find out who the father is; Jessie refuses to tell him, or anyone. Mae has been spending more and more time drinking with her friends – one of whom is clearly her lover. Virgil and Mae go into town, and Carl goes home, where Jessie seems pleasantly surprised to see them. They play with their younger siblings, enjoying a brief moment of real happiness. But then they lie next to each other on a riverbank, and are seen; not a compromising position, but too close for comfort.

Jessie runs off and ends up at her friend Donna’s (Betty Ann Parady) house. Donna tries to get her out to come out that evening; she declines. She tries to get her to open up about the father of her child; Jessie is resolute. Eventually, Carl tracks her down, and they go off to find a private place to talk; Jessie tries to wave away what happened between them as a mistake, an accident, a drunken impulse, but Carl insists otherwise, and brings up the rumor that Virgil isn’t actually her father. Jessie is horrified at his efforts to justify his feelings for her, but the seed of doubt has been planted, and it’ll bear some kind of fruit that summer night.

Like Never Rarely, it touches on the challenges of being unexpectedly pregnant, in a small town, with doubts about the fathers identity (in that film, the doubt is on the part of the viewer), and on the feeling of being stuck where you don’t necessarily belong, but not knowing where you might go if you could actually leave. And the final shots of both films are almost identical, but the circumstances are rather different; Never Rarely ends on a note of serenity, and Night ends on one of uncertainty, as we can’t say just what the future will hold for Jessie and Carl, only that their lives have drastically changed and Canaan is no longer the place for them. But where they are headed, and whether there will be a “them” to speak of, is left a mystery.

And where Elegy tried and failed to show the truth about life in Appalachia, Night succeeds; a few choice shots reveal the generally rundown atmosphere, while a pair of very similar monologues, one from Mae, one from Virgil, make clear how much of a shadow the town is of its former self, back during the war, or back when the mines were still open. Mae regrets moving back to Ohio from California, Virgil regrets leaving the Army, and there’s no forced message about family, misery, or the “real America,” just human pain and regret, which rings very true. There’s more truth in the simple detail of Virgil salting his beer than in all of Elegy.

Director/co-writer/co-editor Joseph L. Anderson was mainly a documentarian before this, and it shows in the cinematography, which captures the characters’ lives and world as they are, in all their harshness and beauty. There are tracking shots to take in the pace and scope of their actions, a stunning slow pan from a medium shot of Jessie standing on a hill, across the treetops of the forest below, to a close-up of Carl, and a vast array of images which drink in the nuances of the characters and their setting, seen now to their best advantage thanks to the glorious restoration, spear-headed by none other than Nicholas Winding Refn. There’s also the brisk, sometimes jagged editing, which suggests both Anderson’s documentary background and the French New Wave, and the sometimes crude but often inventive soundtrack, which uses the dialogue of one scene to contrast or inform another.

Hall is affecting as Jessie; she has the inner strength to keep her secrets and stand up to Virgil’s badgering, but she’s still ready to endure it because she can’t imagine actually getting out of Canaan. Crawford, the only real professional actor in the cast, is effectively pathetic as Virgil, a foolish man who knows he’s a fool and still fights for what little control over his life he can wield. Heimerdinger is a bit stiff and self-conscious, but this works well enough for Carl’s own discomfort in his own skin. Johnson is solid as Mae, especially at showing her insistence on having what fun she can with life; she doesn’t quite get the most out of her crucial final scene, however.

Then again, the script at times feels like…well, like a script. When there’s a story to be told, sometimes total realism has to be set aside. But those hiccups don’t outweigh the many moments of poetic beauty, the human sensitivity, and the lovely black-and-white imagery which make this so powerful a film and so vital a rediscovery. Anderson’s career behind the camera was too brief; he only seems to have made one more film, the intriguing-sounding but even more elusive America First. But this film, which once might have been lost to time, survives as proof of his skill.

Score: 88

The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – ****

The last time I rated Lambs, I rated it an 85 – two points shy of ****. Even then, I admitted it was a fine film in every respect, only that “it all leaves me a little cold.” Well, I now rate it 10 points higher, and there are those who would say I should rate it higher still. But if I only consider a truly great film and not in the absolute highest echelon of greatness (roughly speaking, the films I rate a 97 or higher), does that say more about me or the film? What does it say about me that I dithered over rating it a 94 or a 95?

There’s no getting around how good a film it is. It’s so good, so well made, so well written, so well acted, that it won the Oscar for Best Picture in spite of its less than Oscar-friendly subject matter; you might not expect the people who anointed Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, and Dances with Wolves to go for a film featuring cannibalism, flung semen, severed heads, tucking, and skin suits. But they did, giving it Best Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, and Actress into the bargain. And it’s not like it wasn’t deserved.

Jonathon Demme’s direction grips you from the very start, with that opening scene of Starling running through the woods, the music (Howard Shore’s score is excellent throughout) and those stark opening credits generating a sense of unease before the story has even begun. And once it does, he builds the tension and dread carefully, never overwhelming us with the gruesomeness; even the horrifying image of Lt. Boyle’s dismembered body arranged into a kind of “Angel of Death” is shown at just enough of a remove that it doesn’t make us reflexively shut down. At the same time, he puts the camera right in the actors’ faces, ostensibly to help put us in Starling’s shoes but also to unsettle us with the sheer discomfort of closeness. (He tried to repeat the trick in Philadelphia, with rather overwrought results.)

Ted Tally’s script, adapted (apparently quite faithfully) from Thomas Harris’ novel, is at once a smartly-crafted thriller, a showcase for several well-drawn characters, and a feast of memorable dialogue, from the menacing (“It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again”) to the heartbreaking (“I thought…I thought if I could save just one. But he was so heavy. So heavy”) to the darkly witty (everyone knows “I’m having an old friend for dinner,” but don’t overlook “Love your suit” – a subtle nod, perhaps, to Buffalo Bill’s occupation? – or “I myself cannot”). It strikes the right balance between telling the story and developing the characters and atmosphere. Maybe we could’ve stood to learn a bit more about Bill (okay, Jame Gumb – what a name) and/or Catherine Martin, but that’s nitpicking.

Jodie Foster won her second Oscar as Clarice Starling, and she was the perfect choice for the role in the same way Carey Mulligan was the perfect choice for the lead in Promising Young Woman; she convinces you of her strong will and piercing insight, but also of her fears and vulnerability. She’s not physically imposing (Foster is just 5’3″), but you believe that she would try to carry a lamb to safety without any resources but her own will, and you believe that she would look Hannibal Lecter in the eye and learn what she wants to know, whatever games he wants to play. And he’s not even the most obnoxious person she has to deal with in the course of the story.

Anthony Hopkins won his only Oscar (so far) as Hannibal Lecter, and what can I say about one of the single most iconic performances in American cinema? He relishes every scene, adds the right inflection to every line, right down to his mockery of Starling’s accent (“Does he stink of the lamp?”), knows when to add a dash of camp (that slurping sound) and when to hold back (“Not anymore”). You can argue whether or not he’s a lead (at just under 25 minutes, it’s the second-shortest Best Actor-winning performance ever), but you can’t argue how great he is.

But there are also the supporting performances that weren’t nominated. Scott Glenn is at once avuncular and calculating as Jack Crawford; note how much emotion he puts into a single word, “Clarice,” as he realizes just where Bill actually is and how much danger Starling is in. Ted Levine is thoroughly memorable as Bill, arguably a problematic character but one who, with that nasal voice, those unnerving mannerisms that never go too far over the top, and those unforgettable lines (“Wait – was she a great big fat person?”), makes a most effective villain. And yet he’s still more likable than Anthony Heald as Dr. Chilton, who’s so perfectly smug, so totally incompetent at anything besides tooting his own horn, that you wish the film had kept the joke from the novel where Lecter puns on the word “bilirubin,” a pigment which gives human feces its color and matches the color of Chilton’s hair.

And there’s Brooke Smith, suitably desperate and determined as Catherine Martin; Diane Baker, bringing the right gravitas to role of her mother, Senator Martin, whose encounter with Lecter is a great sick joke of a scene; Kasi Lemmons, later a notable director, who brings a nice note of warmth as Starling’s roommate Ardelia; even Danny Darst, as Sgt. Tate (he has the great moustache), makes his scenes memorable as he shows what happens when a no-nonsense cop comes up against the evil genius of Lecter. It’s a superior ensemble.

Aside from its five wins, the film only got two other Oscar nominations. One was for the editing, which is certainly excellent; look at the scene where the agents are moving in on the house in Calumet City while Bill and Catherine are facing off after she’s gotten ahold of his dog, and we see them preparing to break in while his alarm alerts him to someone at the door, and only when he opens the door and we see only Starling do we realize what Crawford will soon realize to his great horror. It’s a masterfully crafted fake-out, and while I can’t argue with the Oscar for the astoundingly ambitious work on JFK, I wouldn’t have minded Lambs winning this as well. And the other nod was for its sound mixing, which is very well done indeed, especially in the scenes in Bill’s basement, where Catherine’s screams are balanced with his endlessly blaring music and the occasional yaps of his dog. (It lost, not unsurprisingly, to Terminator 2.)

But it didn’t get nominated for Tak Fujimoto’s eerie cinematography, with those nerve-wracking close-ups, those shots of Starling and Chilton bathed in red light, or the careful modulation of explicit detail and discreet detachment. It wasn’t nominated for Kristi Zea’s sets, with the dungeon-like basement where Lecter is kept a socially acceptable mirror for Bill’s own basement (side note: it wasn’t until this viewing that I realized that Bill is or was a neo-Nazi; it’s just a fleeting detail conveyed by a few items in his house), itself, with its off-putting clutter, mirrored by the storage facility full of eerie debris, none eerier than the pickled head of Benjamin Raspail. Nor for Shore’s score or the makeup, stomach-churning as it is.

And there’s plenty more I could get into, all the little moments and lines which add up to a film whose greatness I won’t deny for a second. Again, some might say a 95 is too low a score for a film I can say so much about, but I can only say “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself?” And in the watching, that is what this film is in itself. Truly great, truly memorable, worth seeing many times (as I have done), worth analyzing to praise all the more (as I have done). And if I don’t praise it just that tiny bit louder, then that is what I am in myself. First principles.

Score: 95