Last Updated on September 30, 2020 by rob
A retired FBI profiler named Will Graham (William Peterson) has the ability to put himself into the mind of his quarry and at the prodding of a former colleague (Dennis Farina) reluctantly accepts an assignment to hunt down a serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan) who targets entire families for slaughter. As Graham renews contact with a former adversary known as Hannibal Lecter (Brian Cox) in the hope of understanding the Tooth Fairy’s motives he finds himself pursued by a tabloid reporter and decides to use him as a way of drawing the killer out.
Although time and innumerable variations have somewhat dulled the impact of Manhunter’s central conceit (cop who can think like a serial killer) this still seems to me like its director’s best film. A strong cast certainly helps (the supporting cast in particular are extremely well chosen and they all stand out despite having no more than a handful of lines) and the screenplay has the benefit of drawing from the excellent novel by Thomas Harris. But what works so well cinematically is the story’s thematic clash between a father’s desire to protect his family and the madness – powerfully represented by Noonan’s scary turn as a psychopath desperate for love – that can turn family homes into abattoirs and their inhabitants into grotesquely mutilated corpses. One of the best sequences Mann ever directed is here – a moment where our hero Will Graham falls asleep aboard a passenger flight and dreams of home as a sheaf of gory crime scene pics slip out of the folder on his lap to the hysteria of the little girl in the seat next to him. It’s so unsettling precisely because it personalise’s what’s really at stake.
Peterson is an effectively brooding, nervy presence as the driven cop and Brian Cox is nicely threatening as a caged Hannibal Lector. But Tom Noonan is remarkable as the killer nicknamed The Tooth Fairy. His look, body language and speech are fascinatingly weird and when the character encounters Joan Allen playing a blind photographic assistant the film suddenly becomes way more ambitious, not only delivering on that ambition but in the process turning Noonan into a sympathetic monster (a point also made in a key dialogue exchange between Graham and his boss in which the former laments the cruelty and suffering that turned a suffering child into an adult monster) and really involving us emotionally. Mann of course went on to films bigger in scope, budget and star power but I don’t think he ever made anything as interesting, affecting or distinctive as this. It’s a shame that Jonathan Demme’s bland, politically correct hammy horror, The Silence of the Lambs, got all the adulatory press, box office and awards that IMO really were rather more deserved by Manhunter.
