I READ THE BOOK -- 'Hannibal': Nearly undigestible.

Before Rand Cooper reviews Hannibal, I would like to recall something unusual that happened before this film adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel went into production. I do this to make two points: (1) morality and aesthetics not being separable, a philosophical disease, nihilism, can wreck a literary form, such as melodrama; (2) confronted with stark nihilism, even Hollywood filmmakers can display moral revulsion.

Upon Hannibal's publication, three of the four filmmakers who had covered themselves in glory (fame, great reviews, Oscars) by making its predecessor, The Silence of the Lambs, into a movie, and who had every reason to lick their chops over the prospect of repeating their success with a sequel, announced they would have nothing to do with it. Actress Jodie Foster, scriptwriter Ted Tally, and director Jonathan Demme, no matter what disappointment they felt with the literary quality or cinematic potential of the new book, could have signed on and then reshaped the story to their taste. Instead, they simply walked away from the project. This curt abstention was startling but, though the three obeyed the unwritten Hollywood rule of not publicly badmouthing abandoned projects, I think it is easy to guess at their motives once you have read both The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

The first of Harris's books featuring the genius serial killer Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon, did well with both the critics and the public, but it was the second, The Silence of the Lambs, which brought the author into his kingdom. When vulnerable but dauntless FBI agent Clarice Starling engaged the brilliant, lethal mind of Dr. Lecter within his maximum-security cell in order to track down another serial killer, the relationship projected "chemistry" long before it found its way into a movie. Yet it was certainly the movie version that made that relationship more than vivid, made it almost mythic. As I wrote of the film in this magazine (April 5, 1991), "As Starling probes Lecter for clues, Lecter probes Starling for the roots of her need to save people...At this moment, the viewer has a glimpse of good and evil eternally staring at each other across an impassable force field that lifts this movie above the common run of melodrama."

Good and evil. Staring at each other, fascinated. Not merging. Just understanding and acknowledging each other. That was the key to the success of the Lecter-Starling scenes, which were so powerful that they pretty much overcame the flaws of the rest of the book: its occasional plot absurdities, the flat writing, a certain gratuitous nastiness. Particularly evocative was the way Lecter's malevolence, seemingly absolute and not reducible to psychological explanation, amplified our sense of Starling's goodness. The cannibal doctor's very being presented an acid test, an initiation rite Starling had to undergo before her heroism could emerge. There was certainly moral ambiguity in the fact that virtue had to be aided by evil to catch evil. But it is a sad fact of life we have to learn before becoming truly adult that an evil source can engender a good outcome and vice versa. And it was to the credit of Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, though neither was ever anything more than classy pulp fiction, that they contained and dramatically demonstrated this truth.

Then came Hannibal, a book that concluded the trilogy but also played havoc with the peculiar accomplishments of its predecessors. It begins seven years after Silence. The fugitive Dr. Lecter is now posing as Dr. Fell (!) while giving lectures on Dante and holding a curatorship in Florence. Clarice is still an agent but vilified in the press for a drug bust gone wrong (though she herself behaved irreproachably). Naturally, the FBI puts her on the trail of Hannibal. Much, much transpires, the conclusion presenting us with a Clarice who has joined the doctor in a cannibal feast and is now his constant companion as they savor the delights of Europe together--good food, fashionable clothes, museums, nights at the opera. What strategies does the author deploy to get from point A to point Z and to make all this believable or at least acceptable?

For the doctor, Harris employs two devices. First, he does precisely what so many readers rightly praised the novelist for not doing in the previous installments: he gives Lecter a psychological motive for his malevolence, a World War II atrocity in which the boy Hannibal realizes that his sister has been killed and devoured by soldiers.

Second, Harris employs what I can only call a Steve-the-Crocodile-Hunter strategy. For those of you fortunate enough not to have a nine-year-old who forces you to watch TV nature shows, I must explain that Steve is an idiotic Australian Crocodile Dundee clone who blunders into swamps and jungles all over the world, jerks perfectly well-behaved and self-respecting rattlesnakes out of their nests, and pokes innocent hippos and sharks in the snout just for the sake of getting them to attack him. As he dodges their lunges, he shouts at his audience, "Blimey, mates! This animal is vicious! He wants to kill me!! What on earth can make any creature this malevolent?" Though Steve keeps assuring us that these encounters will enable him to "publish valuable articles in nature journals all over the world" (in your dreams, Steve), I keep hoping that his foot will slip and he'll be devoured by some lovely, dignified predator who then will finish off the camera crew for dessert.

Well, Thomas Harris is a literary Steve the Crocodile Hunter. He keeps setting characters much more odious than Hannibal on the trail of the doctor: a pedophile billionaire; a corrupt, lecherous Justice Department bureaucrat; an avaricious Italian police official; various thugs and assassins. As these petty monsters gang up on the grand monster, we root for the grand monster to eat his tormentors, much as I long for those formidable animals to eat Steve.

As for Clarice, her final defection from the FBI is prepared for by Harris through his depiction of the agency in this post-Ruby Ridge era as rotting from within and willing to sacrifice its best agents on the altar of political expediency. So, hey, if you can't find advancement in the FBI, why not tour Europe with a suave and cultured cannibal?

Do these literary strategies work? Of course not. To evoke the real horrors of World War II as a rationale for the outre atrocities of a melodramatic concoction like Lecter is tasteless and borders on moral irresponsibility. If the idea of a child so traumatized by his sister's killing that he himself imitates her destroyers has any validity, it needs real psychological exploration, not the superficial and opportunistic handling Harris gives it.

Yes, Lecter dispatches monsters worse than himself in this latest book, but what of it? This doesn't create suspense since we don't care about any of his victims. Rather, it puts us in the position of the Roman mob watching gladiators and beasts kill each other. Besides, how are we to forget the innocents that the doctor killed in the previous novels?

Worst of all is Clarice. Turning this plucky, caring, all-American heroine into Eurotrash may be the worst thing an author has done to a character in the history of popular fiction since Conan Doyle launched Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls in the embrace of Professor Moriarty. But Doyle could resurrect Holmes. How can Harris redeem Starling?

Of course, if Harris had had the literary style for it, he could have turned Hannibal into a piece of stylish perversity, something along the lines of an Aubrey Beardsley drawing accomplished with words. Readers can withstand all sorts of narrative nuttiness if highly textured, agreeably mannered writing projects the story into a cloud-cuckooland with a topsy-turvy morality of its own. But how could a writer who perpetrates a sentence like, "As he backed into the shadow across the street, his nose was last to disappear" be up to the task?

So now we can see why the three filmmakers walked away from Hannibal. Almost all of Jonathan Demme's major films, from Citizens Band to Beloved, express a belief in the unpredictability and improvability of human nature. What was he to make of Harris's newly hatched misanthropy? Ted Tally began his playwrighting career with an interest in heroism: his first major play was about the explorer Robert Scott. What was this author to make of a fictional world in which one can only root for villains against other villains? Jodie Foster is not only a good actress but a fierce feminist. What could a feminist make of a heroine who ditches her own heroism to become the Galatea of a monstrous Pygmalion?

Of Silence's four award winners, only the most notable one remained to make Hannibal, Anthony Hopkins. He is the chief reason I will go to see the new movie. What the book's language lacks in stylishness, Hopkins has in every part of his physique and physiognomy, in every shade of his gloating, unforgettable voice. If Hopkins can make the doctor the same malefic imp he gave us in Silence, he may succeed in taking us to a cloud-cuckooland with a morality of its own. And he would be infinitely helped by the scriptwriter Steven Zaillian and the replacement director Ridley Scott if they could create a landscape in which Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling could once again face each other across a moral chasm, fighting each other, fearing each other, respecting each other, appalled by each other, but never, never merging. That Zaillian and Scott have (reportedly) jettisoned the novel's conclusion is a good sign. Melodrama needs simplicity. Evil, as Shakespeare taught us in Richard III, can be magnetic, intelligent, attractive. But the gusto of goodness must never die.

P.S. After writing all the above, I went to see the movie. Every single thing I complained about has been eliminated.