What Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that this Best Picture Oscar winner got condemned by both sides. Family-values advocates like Michael Medved called it too gruesome and disgusting (albeit well made) to deserve the Academy Award. Gay-rights activists said it stereotyped transgendered people as freakish monsters. Still, kids may be curious. The movie concerns extreme psychopaths and the graphic atrocities they commit, including references to twisted sexual urges and perversities. Much of the worst violence is offscreen, in autopsy photos or just discussed -- but that's close enough, and we witness some representative brutality and horror near the climax. The murderous psychologist-serial killer Hannibal Lecter is something of a "gentleman" killer, contrasted with the grotesque "Buffalo Bill," who is shown at one point fully nude. There is an oppressive atmosphere of menace, especially towards women.
- Families can talk about the heroine Clarise Starling, whose plight is actually the core of the film's drama and humanity (Hannibal Lecter just steals every scene and subplot he's in). She's an ambitious but vulnerable orphan, a young woman trying to persevere in an often- grisly career fighting the worst kind of crime, in an environment dominated by men -- even the "normal" ones are pretty creepy. Why do you think Clarice fascinates Lecter so much? Does the movie glamorize violence and glorify a villain?