Manhunter

“Dream much, Will?**” Michael Mann’s one of my core favorite filmmakers for a variety of reasons, and I’m starting to figure out that one of those reasons may be the way he depicts intimacy. There’s a through line in his body of work of these men who are so singularly driven and simultaneously torn in half internally, but these same men then mold so seamlessly into the arms of the women they love (or best try to). The framing of Graham and Dolarhyde as two ends of a morbid spectrum is fascinating to me because they both experience this. Mind flickers to that shot of Tom Noonan in bed after making love with Joan Allen’s character and her hand is draped over his mouth while she sleeps, and that fractured and crumbling look on his face is devastating. A very curious moment of humanity for a character that is otherwise incredibly repulsive. The whole enterprise of Manhunter is pretty much the definition of a criminally underrated work of art. Still find it rather disheartening that, for as acclaimed and lofty and prestigious as Thomas Harris’ Hannibal property has become, so many people don’t even know this one exists. Captures that needling, obsessive edge of Harris’ original novel pretty flawlessly. I often find myself taking for granted just how exactly to a tee William Petersen fills the shoes of Will Graham. To the degree that he’s the de facto image I have of the character in my head anymore. Never goes over the top, lends a fairly unhinged and dangerous role that I have to imagine would be very easy to play bigger a lot of understated grace and patience. That Petersen goes so much of the film playing it with so much restraint and weariness but you can see that obsession and fixation boiling up to the surface as the runtime glides along is so remarkable. That exasperated, almost ecstatic gleam in his eyes when he’s getting in the head of his target is fantastic stuff. To borrow from another Mann Protagonist, all he is is what he’s going after. No matter how much he tries to suppress that. Likewise, it’s very interesting seeing Brian Cox pretty concretely embody so much of what is easily identifiable in every take on Hannibal the Cannibal that has hit the screen at a time that long preceded the character becoming a household name. Evidently, the character was destined to become an iconic figure because Mann deliberately kept his role brief so as to leave the audience wanting more. And, as we’ve seen, they were certainly from to get more. In a lot of ways, when you get a good bit of distance from your latest viewing of Manhunter it becomes easy to look at it as something of an outlier amongst his wider filmog. It’s relatively unique among his work for being, if only in authorship, part of a wider franchise. And it’s been largely, incorrectly overlooked for later iterations. But then you come back to it and it’s honestly a no-brainer that he would be drawn into something like this. Complete nocturnal odyssey. Spinotti is his best DOP and the results here only further strengthen that thought for me. May be in the minority here, and Mann himself would probably balk at this, but I always prefer the way his stuff looks when he shoots with film. Not to say that he can’t or hasn’t worked some magic with a digital lens but the stuff on film just has a texture about it that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Has a real tangibility about it and a purely transcendent quality. Those last fifteen minutes with the cop cars thundering through the pitch black of night and with Graham sneaking around in the moonlit woods are so propulsive and thrilling. The way the stakes amp up to become so intensely personal between two men who only share the screen together exactly once and never even speak to each other is pretty spellbinding. Wish I could properly articulate how rigid the hairs on my arm stand up when he leaps through that window and charges Dolarhyde. The real crime is that Mann never got to do another one of these. One of his more psychologically imposing efforts, without question. I think there’s a lot to pull and pick at with all three of the guys at the head of this thing. Petersen once claimed that he had a hard time shaking Will Graham after the film was finished, eventually going to shave his beard and dye his hair blonde so he wouldn’t have to see him in the mirror. The interesting thing, to me, is that that’s probably exactly what Will Graham would do, too. Must be hard to go around with someone else’s thoughts in your head. He would know. “Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?”