PRINCES IN EXILE
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Let’s get down to hard cases by starting off with a question: Which would you rather see–an intelligent movie about teenage cancer victims, or an intelligent movie about serial killers? Theoretically, it’s hard to imagine many people opting for the first over the second; I certainly wouldn’t, in spite of an almost built-in aversion to slasher movies of all kinds.
A low-budget, partly state-financed Canadian production–with no famous actors, written and directed by people I’ve never heard of, and based on a novel (by Mark Schreiber) that is also unknown to me–Princes in Exile has absolutely no fashionable calling cards. There is nothing even remotely hip about the way the movie sells itself (“a heart-warming story about life’s real heroes . . .”), and most people are likely to find any honest description of its content–the moral education of a sensitive teenage boy with a brain tumor, set at a summer camp for children with cancer–an immediate turnoff.
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All of these characters are realized with a great deal of plausibility, density, tenderness, and sincerity. Without ever sentimentalizing the characters or limiting the story to simple didacticism (although didacticism is certainly an important part of its program), the film winds up saying a great deal about how children with cancer can best cope with their situation. My affection for this film, however, is not merely a matter of its being politically correct and honest and thoughtful about a subject that most of us would rather not think about. It is also entertaining; I felt involved in the story on a purely escapist level.
As The Exorcist did 18 years ago, this movie seems to tap into irrational, mythical impulses that ultimately seem more theological than psychological (or even logical), but there doesn’t appear to be much edification about this aspect of the movie in the rave reviews that have already appeared, which seem better equipped to regurgitate the myth than to analyze it. “Still, watchful, deeply droll and infinitely sinister, he becomes the high priest of criminal psychosis,” enthuses David Ansen about Lecter in Newsweek. “He’s a kind of twisted Sherlock Holmes,” writes Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly, “able to absorb, with heightened, Zen-like detachment, everything that goes on around him, and to draw visionary inferences from the mass of data his senses take in.” They seem to be describing some higher being in Star Wars, but the curious thing about these reviews is that they seem perfectly willing to accept Lecter’s supernatural powers–convincing a hostile prisoner in an adjoining cell to swallow his own tongue, knowing precisely when and where to reach Clarice (the FBI trainee) on the phone–as realistic, or at least believable. Hopkins’s performance is certainly stark and commanding, but none of it would count for beans if the audience weren’t already predisposed to accept his character as some sort of divine presence.
