The Movie
Quick: Name all the movies about cannibalistic and/or gender-confused serial killers that won "The Big Five" Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay). Or you could just spend two hours with the answer, The Silence of the Lambs, the smartly plotted, masterfully executed odyssey of FBI agent-in-training Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) who enlists the aid of imprisoned psychopath Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in order to track down new mass murderer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). The dialogue is quotable, the performances legendary, and while the movie has been imitated (never equaled) and parodied ad infinitum by this point, it still plays as an exceptionally taut thriller, with twists aplenty and complex characters vividly realized.
The Picture
Some readers might recall the drubbing that I gave Gulliver's Travels, a public domain title from a smaller label, for presenting the movie on Blu-ray in previous-generation MPEG-2 format. Well, this is the Academy Award-winning Best Picture of 1990 from a major studio and it too is encoded as MPEG-2, perhaps even utilizing the same master as the most recent Lambs DVD. Tak Fujimoto's camerawork is hypnotic, particularly his use of close-ups, but it does not always reproduce well here.
Clarice's plaid jacket looks to be almost crawling with bugs in some shots and backgrounds appear hard and unnatural in relation to other elements within the 1.85:1 frame. Intentionally out-of-focus foregrounds can look even worse, as when Clarice speaks to Lecter and they are shot (by the camera that is) over one another's shoulders. I wish I could say that this masterpiece of shadow offered sumptuous blacks on Blu-ray, but they often have an ugly video quality to them. In general the image is too soft, frequently noisy, and short on the detail one has come to expect from Blu-ray Disc.
From what I'm hearing, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is overkill for this disc. Dynamic range feels constricted, as even voices seem to be straining against the limits of the track. Rear-channel use is tame, most likely in keeping with the Oscar-winning director's intent for the Oscar-nominated Sound. There's minimal directionality and even that is mainly side-to-side. We're given some surround action when the cop cars and helicopters converge on the courthouse late in Act II for example, and an odd discrete effect like dripping from rear left in Buffalo Bill's basement. Bill's big dance number is mixed bigger than most scenes, during which the shifts between the different rooms inside the house are convincingly reinforced sonically. The soundtrack itself remains amazing regardless, as I still find myself thinking at various points, "Wait, is that music? Is the boiler about to burst? Creepy!"
The Extras
Some, not all of the extras from MGM's 2006 Two-Disc Collector's Edition DVD are carried over for Blu-ray. "Breaking the Silence" presents the 119-minute movie again in its entirety, this time with intermittent picture-in-picture video commentary from Foster, Hopkins and many others, plus pop-up text/graphics, each instance chaptered for easy access. My question: Why not reassemble this as a BD 1.1 BonusView PiP feature that we can choose to add over a good HD transfer instead of wasting the disc space for two entire versions of the movie (using an inefficient codec)? Ah but I digress...
"Inside The Labyrinth: Making The Silence of the Lambs" is a thorough, really enjoyable 66-and-a-half-minute look behind the scenes and beyond, further embellished by the Lambs episode of Bravo's outstanding Page to Screen TV series (41 minutes). "Scoring the Silence" explores the contributions of composer Howard Shore (16 minutes) while the vintage 1991 “Making of” looks soft and is mildly cheesy (eight minutes). We're also given 22 deleted/alternate scenes and excerpts totaling 20-and-a-half minutes, followed by about two minutes of outtakes, all the more amusing in contrast to the deadly-serious movie.
Only "Understanding the Madness," an expert explanation of behavioral science (20 minutes), and one of the trailers are presented in HD. There's also a gallery of TV commercials and a curious audio-only bonus, an Anthony Hopkins answering machine message used to promote the film. As is usually the case, most of the special features from the Criterion Collection DVD are missing. There's still a lot to pick from, obviously.
Final Thoughts
This movie is so dense with creative detail that it absolutely benefits from repeat viewings in the best possible format. Technically that's Blu-ray, although the video most of all should have been better than this modest upgrade from DVD.
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