MOVIES : Why Do Critics Love These Repellent Movies? : COUNTERPOINT : Sometimes arresting, intelligent films happen to be about seamy subjects. Case in point: ‘The Silence of the Lambs’

Among his interesting collection of blanket statements, Stephen Farber has one unarguable point: There are more violent films being made and being reviewed today than any time within memory. And the violence in them is escalating: The shocking slow-mo deaths of Bonnie and Clyde that were such a point of controversy 24 years ago have gone on to become a film convention. Bloody, all-out confrontations, which used to be saved for a movie’s final moments, are the punctuation marks of mainstream action films today.

We live in violent times; proof of that is everywhere, from the war that was just played out in our living rooms, to the meaner streets where we live, to an amateur’s videotape of a beating, played and replayed on our nightly news. How much of that reality finds its way into films--and with what degree of seriousness or exploitation--is a troubling matter for anyone but especially those who write about film for a living.

But to say that violent, “repellent” films “are the most consistently fashionable” among film critics today is more than a little misleading. It suggests that since “GoodFellas” and “The Grifters” turned up on many year-end lists, critics have rushed to champion hard-edge films. It ignores the fact that those same lists may also have included “Vincent & Theo,” “To Sleep With Anger,” “Life and Nothing But,” “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” “Avalon,” “Cyrano de Bergerac” or “Dances With Wolves,” those humanistic films we supposedly shy away from at the risk of being thought sentimental. Rubbish. What we look for is the arresting, intelligent film, not the seamy subject; sometimes they’re the same, often they’re not.

(“GoodFellas” got six Academy Award nominations including best picture, screenplay and director; “The Grifters” won four, director and screenplay included. Does that mean that academy members, too, have been caught in this horrific downward spiral toward bloody-mindedness? Did the critics make them do it?)

That’s as bizarre as the thought of “the critics” as a body: one pair of eyes, one brain and a singularly bloodthirsty appetite. Since Farber has served honorably as a critic himself, it’s strange to see him fall into the trap of considering critics as a monolithic “they.” He must also know that the “absolutely ecstatic reviews” for “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” were more than offset by absolutely lousy ones; that both “GoodFellas” and “The Grifters” had their share of strong critical dissenters and that supporters of “After Dark, My Sweet” might consider themselves a minority voice.

Actually the one thing that critics everywhere have in common is their likelihood to disagree. Heatedly. Some have even made a career of it. However, even when a number of critics like a film, it’s for as many different aesthetic reasons as there are writers to air them. To decide, then, that in the presence of ultra-violent films we’re all suddenly gripped by the same pathology is--among other things--willfully simplistic.

There’s a more fundamental question here though, and that’s Farber’s description of criticism as thoughtful consumer guidance. To see or not to see may be a byproduct of what we do, but ideally we’re there to discuss, to interpret, to help an audience understand a film when they see it. One essayist, the late Northrop Fry in his “Anatomy of Criticism,” defined criticism as “the voice for the arts.”

That’s something to aspire to. More modestly, we’re fascinated by the why behind what we see. Why is the downfall of one cheap mobster like Henry Hill worth 2 1/2 hours of anyone’s time? In what way does Martin Scorsese’s unsparing detailing of that life shed light on the particular times in which Hill--and all of us--live? Or does it?

That need to examine may be one reason why so many critics have written in such depth about “The Silence of the Lambs,” suggesting ways it can be approached. It is tough material for a mainstream movie. Yet none of the reviews I checked--pro or con--saw it as the “thoroughly morbid and meaningless depiction of the modus operandi of a couple of sadists” that Farber describes. The difference was as sharp as a cameraman’s shift of focus: Farber’s attention was fixed on one pair of characters; nearly all the critics were watching another.

Why make such a film at all? Farber asks. Because, for one thing, such people do exist, and the director, Jonathan Demme, as well as the novelist Thomas Harris, are responding to the darkest edges of a world they see. Because, to many of us, the shock material is not the film’s subject and the director’s “tact” is intentional. As J. Hoberman suggested in the Village Voice: “beneath the narrative, there’s a river of tears.”

To many critics, it is the unwavering courage and empathy of Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling that is at the core of the film. Even the mesmerizing Dr. Lecter is seen in relationship to her, and Jame Gumb, the maniac on the loose, is very nearly a footnote.

The title, after all, refers to a central incident in Clarice’s girlhood that triggered the rescue fantasies by which she now lives; she feels it is up to her to rescue the lambs, the victims--so far, young women whose lives were not all that different from her own.

The film is Clarice’s odyssey. She will face a monster--with another monster as her guide, trusting him with intimate secrets in return for information with which to rescue her “lamb” (one who turns with such uncharitable bitchiness on her rescuer). Clarice is resolute but terrifyingly vulnerable. She’s still an FBI trainee, and as Terrence Rafferty’s New Yorker review observed, “She has to confront the horrors of Lecter and Buffalo Bill without any way of knowing whether’s she’s adequately protected, physically or psychologically.”

This is harrowing stuff, but it is something audiences understand. It is a touching and a human fear and the reason, I believe, that the film resonates as powerfully and as personally as it does--with those able to pull their eyes away from its figures of evil.

Finally, as for Farber’s astonishing statement that contemporary film criticism contains no perspective, no sense of what is truly valuable in art or in life, I can only wonder what writers Farber reads--or, more to the point, which ones he doesn’t. A very long list can be supplied on request.