A Note on Hannibal's Exquisite Taste

Recently, I wrote about the new Netflix series Chef’s Table, a look into the kitchens of six of the world’s premiere chefs. This week, NBC responded with their own examination of one of the world’s rarest culinary talents: Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Time, generally speaking, has not been kind to portrayals of Lecter, and there have been several ranging from interesting, Brian Cox, to award winning, Anthony Hopkins, to downright risible, the less said about Gaspard Ulliel’s turn as the good doctor the better. Cox’s performance is probably the best of these. His Hannibal is louche, sprawling, and speaks at a languid pace. This is not the tightly wound Lecter of Silence of the Lambs. And speaking of Hopkins, with each passing year it is more and more regrettable that one of the world’s great screen actors will have won his Academy Award for this role. It does not even rate in Hopkins top five performances (which are, incidentally: C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands, Richard Nixon in Nixon, Charles Morse in The Edge, Burt Munro in The World’s Fastest Indian,  and as Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter). Hopkins’ Lecter is a hissing, preening, caricature. He’s been described, by Grantland’s Andy Greenwald among others, as an unsheathed razor—a description which is more accurate than it intends to be, as the performance is all edge and no thrust.

Not so with Mads Mikkelsen, in what is undoubtedly the best performance of his career. Not only is his Hannibal is a man of exquisite taste, but he is also a man capable of both preternatural stillness and startlingly kinetic violence. Often while watching this show, I am reminded of Brad Pitt’s character in Meet Joe Black, a human form inhabited for a short time by Death itself. Hannibal is like that, something from the outer dark beyond the light rim on the universe intruding into the human realm. This is the best Hannibal Lecter you are ever going to see. That such a character exists on NBC’s air is, by itself, something of a minor miracle. Preserved season after season as the result of a unique funding structure, NBC actually makes a small amount of money airing Hannibal prior to its ad revenue, and its universal acclaim amongst televisions truest gourmands, Hannibal is a singular aesthetic experience. Beautiful and menacing, taught and torpid, powerful and placid, it is the finest thing on TV right now.