Hannibal may never talk (the boy only screams in terror at night) but if bullies try to push him around too cavalierly, they're liable to wind up with forks sticking out of their palms.
Hannibal is in his midteens when he notches his first kill in "Hannibal Rising." It happens 40 minutes into Peter Webber's movie. A fat, stupid, filthy, ugly butcher flings obscene insults at his Japanese aunt as she shops, and then swats her grossly on the bottom.
Bad move, that. She has been secretly teaching Hannibal the Japanese martial art of Bushido andintroducing him to the incomparable slicing power of medieval Japanese cutlery. Soon, the butcher's severed head adorns her basement as a gift presented to the beautiful and delicate Japanese woman he'd insulted.
In no time at all, we're also informed that said ugly butcher was also a Vichyite - a Nazi collaborator who blithely sent children to their deaths in Nazi camps.
And that, in microcosm, is the whole prequel tale of "Hannibal Rising" in which writer Thomas Harris - our premier literary Gothicist - invents the "backstory" of Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter to tell us how the most weirdly popular monster of our time got that way.
It was, it seems, the long protracted vengeance of an aggrieved son and brother against the barbarians responsible for the deaths of his parents and the slaughter and eating of his little sister Mischa.
Hannibal Lecter, then, virtually began as the most famous of modern fictional serial killers by representing the vengeance of Old Europe on the Barbarians loosed by the Nazis and their war. After that initial murder, we spend the whole movie watching the young cannibal become the youngest medical student in Paris and dispatching everyone involved in turning his little sister into Eastern front carrion.
It's a movie, then, about The Monster As Avenging Angel.
Thomas Harris wrote this film script before he wrote the best-seller "Hannibal Rising" and the script is nothing if not fast, tight and glowing with that weird, horrific black light that seems to emanate from everything that comes from Harris' imagination. That it's directed by Peter Webber, the man who made the exquisite "Girl with a Pearl Earring," means that this is a horror thriller about Old Europe with uncommon intelligence and atmospheric terror.
Webber's star as Hannibal is sallow-cheeked Gaspard Ulliel, a lean, lanky near-double for Ben Cross back in his "Chariots of Fire" days and almost nothing at all like the two actors who turned Hannibal Lecter into everyone's favorite monster, Brian Cox (in "Manhunter") and, especially, the great Anthony Hopkins in "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Hannibal." Everyone involved here was too smart to opt for physical resemblance when what was really necessary was terminal creepiness. And that Ulliel has down.
Nor does the excellence of the cast end there. Playing Lady Murasaki, the Japanese aunt/stepmother/tutor/lover whom Harris named after the primal Japanese novelist, is Gong Li, the Chinese actress who is one of the most beautiful film actresses in the world and one of the most haunting. (Remember Scarlett Johansson in "Girl with a Pearl Earring" to remember all that Webber can do onscreen with a beautiful female face.)
Playing the Parisian policeman and sympathetic war crime investigator on Hannibal's case is Dominic West, also ideal casting for this movie.
Expect none of the weird nightmarish merriment that Hopkins so famously brought to this role. This, after all, is the movie that tells us how this fantasy monster - so much more interesting than real serial killers are - came into being because at the same time he was feeding his little sister in war-ravaged Lithuania, wolves were literally outside their door devouring the carcasses of their family.
In other words, we know now far more than ever that everybody Hannibal Lecter has ever slaughtered (and consumed) is a way of turning the world's shameless barbarism in on itself. It's an easy fantasy for us as putatively civilized people to have. Consider that a lot of psychobabbling hooey if you like but, believe me, it doesn't make this newest installment of the horrifically popular saga any the less interesting or affecting.
This may not be the fantasy Hannibal Lecter who has the ultimate fictional contempt for vulgarity, That's the one people love to laugh and shudder at - the Serial Killer as a kind of obscenely "civilized" Simon Cowell, a connoisseur of fine food and recordings of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" who makes especially short work of civilization's enemies.
These are his student years in his trade, after all. A mere apprentice, really.
