MOVIES : Why Do Critics Love These Repellent Movies? : POINT : Moviegoers looking for guidance are becoming alienated by reviewers’ penchant for grotesque violence

It is still early in 1991, but “The Silence of the Lambs” has earned the best reviews of any movie released so far this year, and it is hard to imagine any film snaring more superlatives by December. A movie about a serial killer who skins his victims might seem like an odd bet to win top honors from august critics’ groups, but the tributes should not surprise anyone who has monitored the critics’ tastes over the last few years.

“The Silence of the Lambs” is only the latest in a long line of super-violent, repellent movies to inspire critical hosannas. It follows in the bloody tradition of “The Grifters,” “GoodFellas,” “After Dark, My Sweet,” “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” and horrific earlier favorites like “Dead Ringers” and “Blood Simple.”

Most of these films drew limited audiences, but every one of them earned absolutely ecstatic reviews. Extreme violent melodramas aren’t the only kinds of movies to captivate the critics, but they are the most consistently fashionable. The unqualified enthusiasm for these grisly films raises nagging questions about the skewed values of today’s critics.

“The Silence of the Lambs” is well acted by Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, and several sequences are well directed by Jonathan Demme. Critics have noted that the scenes of torture are not as gruesome as they might have been, which I suppose means that the mutilations are gracefully executed. Yes, the picture is tactfully made, but the question remains, why make it at all? The skilled craftsmanship and the directorial restraint can’t change what the film is--a thoroughly morbid and meaningless depiction of the modus operandi of a couple of sadists. Buffalo Bill, the killer who is the object of the police manhunt, tortures his female victims, removes their skins, then stuffs the larva of a caterpillar down their throats. Hannibal (the Cannibal) Lecter, the psychopath who helps FBI agent Clarice Starling to track Buffalo Bill down, kills his victims by biting their tongues and eyes out before feasting on their flesh.

We know that these kinds of madmen exist, but the film offers no insight into what makes them tick. Perhaps there is no comprehensible explanation for such sadistic fury, but then what is the reason for detailing these crimes on film? Surely if we are to go through such an ordeal at the movies, we expect to come away with some enlightenment--even if only a provocative hint as to what social dysfunctions might stir this kind of criminal behavior. But “The Silence of the Lambs” offers no understanding of the horror, and what many critics like about it is precisely this absence of sociological or psychological commentary. If it tried to offer an explanation for violence, that would make it a quaint message picture, the kind of tract critics despise.

But there are other viable approaches. Demme’s movie doesn’t find the twisted humanity in a monster, as Fritz Lang did when he made his classic “M,” or as Hitchcock did when he highlighted the childlike vulnerability of Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates. In many of his films Hitchcock unsettled us by exposing the perverse curiosity and the antisocial impulses that linked “normal” people to criminals; that was the strategy of “Psycho” and of “Shadow of a Doubt,” in which Teresa Wright was unmistakably attracted to her murderous uncle, Joseph Cotten. Demme toys with a similar theme by putting the FBI agent in partnership with the psychopathic Dr. Lecter, but he never establishes a symbiotic bond between Clarice and the killers she stalks.

“The Silence of the Lambs” doesn’t even qualify as a crackerjack suspense film. It is simply a freak show. The criminals are so bizarre and extreme in their sadistic pleasures that they are more ridiculous than frightening; a transsexual madman who slices human skin in order to design a dress is too outlandish a figure to incite nightmares.

I suspect that many people who see the movie on the critics’ recommendation will be revolted rather than thrilled, and they may scratch their heads trying to imagine what enraptured the reviewers. It is possible to understand the critics’ endorsement, but not by looking at the film itself. The critics adore Jodie Foster and Jonathan Demme, and reviewers frequently respond on cue to a favored auteur rather than conducting the painstaking task of evaluating each individual movie on its own merits. Both Foster and Demme have indeed done superb work in the past, and now they are reaping borrowed glory from their past achievements.

To fathom the glowing reviews for “The Silence of the Lambs,” it is also necessary to recognize some of the critical upheavals of the last decade. It has become chic to praise a movie for being nihilistic, macabre, unsentimental. Sophisticated critics don’t want to be accused of being bleeding hearts--they don’t want to fall for the earnest, well-meaning social problem pictures that were favorites of critics 30 years ago. And so they go to the opposite extreme to prove their tough-mindedness.

The same critics who salivate over “The Silence of the Lambs” or “The Grifters” tend to bring out their assault weapons when they confront one of those socially conscious, humanistic movies today. Consider their reviews of “Awakenings” and “The Long Walk Home,” two movies that did not receive anything like the critical acclaim they deserved. They have their champions, of course, so people who only read movie ads might think they were well-reviewed. In truth, they were mocked by many of the more literate critics, derided as sanctimonious tearjerkers.

But if you look closely, neither movie is as simplistic or sentimental as the hostile critics charge. “The Long Walk Home,” a moving look at the origins of the civil rights movement in the South, is thoughtful, modest and well-observed; it avoids turning the white characters into caricatures. And “Awakenings” is not an antiseptic inspirational movie. It does affirm the courage and compassion of the doctor (Robin Williams) who struggles to revive the brain-damaged patients in his care, but it also acknowledges the ultimate futility of his efforts. It’s ultimately a searing tragedy, not a feel-good fantasy about a lovable doctor and his endearing patients.

In other words, “Awakenings” is what I thought movies were supposed to be; it aspires to embrace the full breadth of human experience. When did critics get the lunatic idea that the greatest movies were the cold-blooded dissections of human venality and depravity? In contemporary film criticism there’s no perspective, no sense of what is truly valuable in art or in life. One wouldn’t object to critics praising “The Grifters” as an entertaining film noir or admiring “Silence of the Lambs’ ” acting and directing. But to call them the best films of the year, as some critics have done, is a travesty.

All criticism is subjective, and movie reviews often reveal more about the critics than about the works under scrutiny. If middlebrow pundits of the ‘50s who honored movies with noble intentions were displaying their own timorousness, one hesitates to think what the appetite of today’s critics for tales of angry, maladjusted outsiders tells about them. Their enthusiasm for grotesque violence is as narrow and dubious an aesthetic as the knee-jerk liberalism of their predecessors.

Intelligent moviegoers who look to critics for thoughtful consumer guidance are becoming increasingly alienated from the reviewers--unless they’re too intimidated to disagree. Between the monosyllabic gurglings of the TV critics and the frequently demented rantings of the hipper print critics, the level of critical discourse has sunk to a new low. It’s about time that a few people pointed to the rave reviews for a nasty piece of goods like “The Silence of the Lambs” and shouted that the emperors of the press have no clothes.