There's a distracted, absent quality to almost everything Hopkins
does, a sense of withdrawal into private realms of anguish or
contemplation. He's often deliberately uncommunicative,
mistrustful of surface emotion – and hence born to play the bottled-up
Englishmen of the Merchant Ivory films. As Hannibal Lecter he does
communicate, but only through psychic shafts of thought which blind us
to the depths of the intelligence behind them. Even his frequent
hamminess – like Al Pacino's - has a kind of rugged stature, and he isn't
afraid to deploy it in performances as brave and serious as his Titus: a
magnificent, wracked portrait of grief and fury learning the
redundancy of pride.
