"Manhunter" (1986) Review + Analysis

I've now seen three adaptations of Thomas Harris’s psychopathic literary icon, Hannibal Lecter. While the novels were and continue to be long standing hits of the airport bookstore crime genre, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs has arguably overtaken its source material in status and is the foremost piece of fiction associated with Lecter, and for good reason. Jodie Foster gives a sturdy performance and Anthony Hopkins gives a performance so discomforting that it continues to define his nearly 60 year career well into his 80s.

The most contemporary of these adaptations is Hannibal the series, which pushed the boundaries of how much bloody, culinary viscera is acceptable for network television and offers the most thorough character analysis of Lecter of any screen depiction. While iconic and worthy of praise, both of Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal have some fairly blatant flaws. Hannibal remains a cut above most network TV but still suffers from the same pacing, schlocky acting, and tropey archetypes of its peers (the visualization of Will Graham’s abilities is particularly corny), and Lambs is often too caught up in its (intentional or not) anti-LGBTQ+ fear mongering and titular character to give Foster’s Clarice Starling her equally deserved depth. However, having now seen Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the first adaptation of any of Harris’s works, it's apparent the Miami Vice director achieved the strongest depiction of any Lecter (or Lecktor as it’s spelled here) adjacent story, more thematically dense and compositionally interesting than either subsequent attempts.

Adapting Red Dragon, Manhunter focuses on the conflict between Will Graham and serial killer the Tooth Fairy, the same source material which serves as inspiration for Hannibal’s third season. I'm undeniably a fan of the show, but Hugh Dancy is not capable of the subtlety William Petersen brings to Graham (maybe he is but I haven’t seen it), which in large part is supported by Mann’s script and overall vision for the film. Central to Mann's filmography is blurring institutional moral lines, focusing on men so passionate and skillful at their occupation that their sense of self is lost or defined by their roles and not by identity or moral code, severing ties from those they love not by want but by perceived necessity. Often this character is presented in parallel to their equivalent on the opposing side of the central conflict, two unstoppably driven figures supposedly on opposite ends of a moral system that slowly begin to resemble each other until by the films end they are nearly indistinguishable. Of Mann's films I've seen so far, this most obviously applies to Heat, but it's undeniable that Will Graham, a character defined by his closeness to those he (man)hunts, would be a perfect protagonist for the director to explore.

So much of Manhunter is about perception. Mann-ian protagonists are frequently men backed into a corner, their desires and a better life just barely in reach before they reluctantly give it all up, accepting the life they think they're destined to lead. Will Graham and Francis Dollarhyde, however, see their supposedly destined paths ahead of them from the very beginning, Graham the psycho cop destined to fall off the deep end and Dollarhyde the undesirable loner driven to kill, but not entirely by their own volition. Instead, as much as these men try to shake it they are constantly being framed with these perceptions in mind: Graham is deceptively pulled back into the agency life and constantly framed as the cop to crazy for his own good by Lecktor and the tabloid media and Dollarhyde pushed further into his madness by Lecktor and his desires inaccurately portrayed in the same tabloids. Graham and Dollarhyde both know the only way to escape these fates is avoid perception entirely for Graham staying out of the media is the only way he avoids personal danger and involvement, while Dollarhyde destroys mirrors as not to perceive himself and is only allows himself the opportunity to feel desired by a woman who cannot visually perceive him to due blindness. There’s an entire essay to be written about the role of mirrors, reflections, glass, photography, and vision in this movie.

However, while Graham himself even acknowledges the closeness of the two men, saying “it’s just you and me now, sport,” as much to the elusive Tooth Fairy as he is to his own reflection, Graham ultimately is the more hopeful, or at the very least luckier of the two. While both men possess the privilege of perception/spectatorship via spying on each other, victims, etc., Graham’s support network and love for his family seemingly ground his perception in reality, shaking the burden of others’ views and fears about him, while Dollarhyde can barely parse reality as it appears in front of him. It’s as he says to Lecktor, his intellect isn’t what allows him to catch these people, it's that they’re insane and he isn’t. This is maybe too reductive, but it reflects the ways that even in success Graham is closer to Dollarhyde and Lecktor than he wants to admit.

Mann is even smart enough to give us a brief glimpse into a world in which roles are reversed in the final conflict. Before Graham comes blasting through the window Dollarhyde nearly gives up, sees himself in a new light because for the first time he isn’t forcing himself to be the object of desire but destroying the only affection he’s ever known. For a brief second, it feels possible nobody will die tonight. Instead, Graham’s lust for justice leads to the potentially unavoidable death of his fellow officers and killing Dollarhyde himself. It might have gone down that way regardless, but for one scene only we see get a brief peek into what might have been had their upbringings and social safety nets been reversed. Dollarhyde is just significantly more nuanced than Lambs’ Buffalo Bill and Graham more flawed and personally invested than Foster’s Clarice Starling, and it’s the depth of these characters that elevates Manhunter far beyond any other Lecter adaptation I’ve seen.

Interestingly and unfortunately, both Dollarhyde and Buffalo Bill are entrenched in stereotypes aligning queer people with sexual deviancy, dangerous mental illness, and criminal perversion to different degrees of harmfulness. Buffalo Bill fairly directly engages in the transphobic depiction of trans people as groomers and predators popularized by TERFs, no matter how much the film suggests it has nothing to do with this. Tooth Fairy is less directly tied to offensive depictions of queer people but to the readiness with which the public accepts figures like the Tooth Fairy as likely queer. This once again ties into the film’s interest in the effects one’s outward perception has on an individual as Dollarhyde’s prime desire is to be seen and understood as he wishes, the intentional mischaracterization acts as an effective tool to draw him out and may subtly comment on queerness being a default assumption for criminals like Dollarhyde, yet his rejection of this label feels just as rooted in homophobia as those the film is possibly critiquing.

In regards to the antagonist at the film’s center, Manhunter’s focus on developing Dollarhyde into an interesting individual in his own right in lieu of further mythologizing Lecktor not only streamlines the narrative, it's the most impactful application of the character. Being mostly relegated to an unseen spector of Graham and Dollarhyde’s fascination and trauma, Lecktor fills a more important role of being another point of similarity between the two that is both real to a degree while also projected onto them, ultimately resulting in Lecktor being all the scarier for it. This is not to deprive Brian Cox’s performance of the spotlight, which draws more fear from its mundanity than either Hopkins or Mikkelsen more haunting takes, and is eerily close to his depiction of Logan Roy’s more corporate facing in Succession, a comparison which only deepens the psychopathy of the billionaire patriarch.

The needle drops in this are some of the best I’ve ever heard, not only how they fit sonically into their respective scenes but in the way the text of each song is subversively thematically relevant. The Prime Movers’ “Strong As I Am,” a fairly straightforward track about resisting the pull of love and wanting to be seen as you are, is brilliantly recontextualized/subverted to represent Dollarhyde’s weakness to his violent urges. Similarly, Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida'' blasting “won’t you come with me and take my hand and walk this land” as he stands over the dying Dollarhyde brilliantly emphasizes the ways in which Graham’s violence and obsession dangerously treads similar ground as the criminals he pursues. For better or worse the music in Mann films are always notable, but this is the most obviously and successfully intentional I’ve experienced thus far.

While remarkably well applied, these song choices are far from subtle and are in line with the bombast of Mann’s typical visual flair, which could be described as hyper stylized reality. No shot in this movie feels removed from the harsh world of FBI manhunts, but the natural elements of each scene are brought to their artistic extreme, most notably the lighting. Scenes illuminated by moonlight are soaked in the deep lunar blue, elevating the intimacy and comfort between Graham and his wife, while scenes in FBI labs are lit purely by the clinical colors of equipment. Aside from heightening the palpability of the film's emotions, Mann’s style suggests a more subjective reality than a more naturalistic approach might, more firmly placing us in the perspectives of Graham and Dollarhyde’s fractured minds.

Manhunter may not be Mann’s greatest or most experimental work, but it is easily the most fully formed of his early works, even when compared to the more iconic Thief or the more straightforward Last of the Mohicans. Its style, character dynamics, and fluid storytelling feel perfectly in line with his magnum opus Heat or his modern masterpiece Miami Vice, making it all the more cruel that this film seems destined to live in the shadows of radically less inspired works based in the same source material.