Third place:
Terminator 2: Judgment Day [98 points / 15 votes]
Second place:
Barton Fink [192 points / 29 votes]
And the Muriel goes to...
The Silence of the Lambs [211 points / 31 votes]
"Jodie Foster’s inquisitive eyes peer just past the camera. She tugs nervously at a pearl earring with her bandaged right hand. Her head is square in the middle of the frame, and everything beyond her damp and tousled ponytail is out of focus. She’s playing FBI trainee Clarice Starling, seated with a polite grin in her superior’s office early on in The Silence of the Lambs. This crisp close-up, which emphasizes the actress’s face to the exclusion of all else, is typical of the film’s shot/reverse shot sequences. They scrutinize the beads of sweat on Foster’s forehead and the creases that web Anthony Hopkins’ eye sockets. Their proximity makes them uncomfortably intimate. They turn this drum-tight Grand Guignol thriller into a work of sustained portraiture.
"A few years earlier, director Jonathan Demme made Swimming to Cambodia, a record of a Spalding Gray one-man show. The visual material he had on hand was Gray himself, with his arching eyebrows and wild gesticulations. Demme’s shifting angles toward and distances from Gray’s body answered one particular question: How do you make the film exciting to watch without distracting from the performer onstage? On The Silence of the Lambs, Demme and his cinematographer Tak Fujimoto wrestled with a wide ensemble and a wealth of exposition, both potentially deadening hazards for a screen adaptation. To make this material work, they shot an ornately fictional film with a documentary eye. The camera glides through small town locations in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, soaking up detail. It hovers over practitioners of forensic science, entomology, and dressmaking with tender curiosity. The sets and characters wear an understated palette of overcast grays and forest greens. The realism intensifies the horror.
"In this context, those conversational close-ups begin to look like talking head testimonies, relaying information directly to the camera. Or perhaps they’re Errol Morris-style interrogations, putting each subject’s behavior onscreen for the audience to interpret. As Hannibal invites Clarice, so too does Demme invite the viewer to scan this dense footage for clues. Given someone’s exterior, could you glean their soul? The stygian inner sanctum of serial killer Buffalo Bill affords just such an opportunity. As played by Ted Levine, Bill’s no mere bogeyman, but rather a figure whose passions exert their own gravitational pull. If the chatty Hannibal is this film’s Spalding Gray, then Bill is its equivalent to David Byrne in Demme’s Stop Making Sense. The film even indulges its monster with a new wave music video, a showstopper full of sinister charisma that’s subsequently grown into an object of transphobic fascination. Buffalo Bill is evil; that’s never in question. Yet evil, in The Silence of the Lambs, does not preclude the capacity for love.
“'The world’s more interesting with you in it,' says Hannibal to Clarice. This may mean simply that he’s not planning to kill and eat her, but the sentiment carries a profound sweetness, too. It’s consistent with the film’s perverse humanity— its openness to people and possibilities. A spectral Steadicam shot can orbit Clarice, and it can stalk her, and it can assume her point of view. A stark close-up can seem to sympathize with the person at its center while isolating them and infringing on their privacy. These tools are not harmless, nor are they neutral. This kind-hearted horror movie recognizes that frightening power and wields it like a bolt of lightning." ~ Alice Stoehr
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