The Film Experience

by Jason Adams

When I think back on Jodie Foster's Oscar-winning turn playing Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 I tend to think of a overwhelmed young woman -- Demme is constantly framing Foster as the smallest person in the room -- but one who musters up unimaginable courage. She pushes deeper into that blacked-out basement as another young woman and an injured dog shriek from the bottom of a blood-streaked pit. And I tend to think of that same small and overwhelmed young woman standing in room after room after room of big dope-faced men staring down at her, eyes narrowed, disbelieving.

What I don't particularly tend to think of first is Clarice Starling smiling. And yet she does... Often and broadly!

Think of her flirting with the entomology nerds who give her the Death's-Head moths information, or working out clues with her best bud Ardelia (Kasi Lemmons) on their FBI dormitory beds after a shower -- they're practically bouncing on their mattresses together, so giddy are they with this work; with their calling actually answering back. You see it in her conversations with Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) -- for all his insidious whispers of sodomy Clarice just isn't that fucked up. Her secrets are of decency, bone deep.

And so for all of the dogged and serious-minded determination that she's known for Foster also lets us see, time and again, what a thrill this job is for Clarice, and how she can feel her own weirder personality traits snapping into place with the duties she's being handed. It clearly feels like destiny, like her story's provenance, a first chapter, and it feels good. Right. All the scary stuff, from this angle, becomes secondary -- she's silencing those screaming little lambs at last. How could she not be relieved? The Silence of the Lambs is a horror film for sure but it's also an origin story for a damned-good detective, a super capable hero of sorts -- a woman willing to stand between us and the darkness and shoot.

There are two smiles from Clarice in the film's final scene that stood out to me on this week's might-be-thousandth re-watch, and they come within seconds of each other. Clarice has just saved the day (and the girl) and we cut from her in shock being cradled by Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), who pushes away a news-camera, to Clarice's FBI Academy graduation where the flashbulbs are going off. Clarice struts proudly across the stage, beaming down to Ardelia in the audience -- the suddenness of this transition wipes away not just what was a good passage of time but also the need for any emotional rehabilitation for Clarice. One minute she's in shock, the next she's beaming -- Clarice, in case you missed it, is gonna be just fine, you guys.

The second smile is a little more sphinx-like, and ends that toothy surety with a question mark appropriate for the genre we're in, coloring that happy ending a shade more red -- that legendary call from Lecter comes just as Clarice exits stage left, the one where he's "having an old friend for dinner." Hannibal tells her not to worry, that...

"I have no plans to call on you, Clarice. The world's more interesting with you in it."

And here Clarice smiles the world's most minutely observed smile, so small it's able to shift back to seriousness with barely a flicker off Foster's face. And yet it registers -- Clarice is flattered she's been deemed "interesting" by the hoity-toity cannibal in the warm-weather floppy hat.

That is the tension at the heart of the whole Lecter tale, whether it's the drug-induced romantic spree Julianne Moore gets handed in Ridley Scott's sequel or the three seasons worth of homoerotic flirtations in Bryan Fuller's Hannibal series. The darkness will find a way in, somehow. It will mark us, even if with smiles. And Jodie Foster just captured it, the whole of it, on her face one moment here and gone so fast.

Previously in "Great Moments in Horror Actressing"...