‘Clarice’: Agent ‘Silence of the Lambs’ doesn’t quite get his due

Two long shadows hang down Clarice, the new CBS drama that follows FBI Agent Clarice Starling in the wake of her confrontation with serial killer Buffalo Bill. The first shadow is cast by The Thesilenceofthelambs, the 1991 film that swept through the top five Oscar categories that year, including an Oscar for Best Actress for Jodie Foster as Clarice. The second shadow comes from Hannibal, the NBC drama about the far more iconic murderer of Silence, cannibalistic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter.

Thirty years later, Silence remains the undisputed masterpiece of the serial-killer-drama genre: creepy, darkly comedic, and psychologically complex in a way that largely avoids fetishizing the killers themselves, though much of Anthony Hopkins’ dialogue is became part of the national lexicon just after. It’s so awesome in almost every way that the most creative films and shows in this world must have approached the material very differently. The style of Hannibal

was so baroque, sometimes bordering on science fiction, that it felt like no one had tried before. (It was also a small miracle that such a weird and gory show aired for three seasons on a broadcast network, even though NBC got the show cheaply through international distributor Gaumont.) The material on Buffalo Bill butchering his victims so he could dress in a woman’s costume has always been problematic and certainly hasn’t aged well, although the film goes out of its way to claim that Bill wasn’t transgender.

Clarice largely tries to avoid the problem when his crimes are discussed.Film and television rights Red Dragon, the book by Thomas Harris which introduced Hannibal, and Thesilenceofthelambs , which introduced Clarice, have been sold separately, which at the moment means the two characters can no longer appear in the same adaptation. Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller had hoped to unravel this issue in order to use Clarice in a potential fourth season. Instead, she is headlining this new show, from Star Trek: Discoveryproducers Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet. Although he often refers to the events of

Silence Lecter cannot be mentioned by name, and is only alluded to once, when Clarice’s current therapist (Shawn Doyle) points out that her last “was being held in a hospital for insane criminals.” Clarice talks a lot about its main character’s attempts (played here by Australian actor Rebecca Breeds) to part ways with the Buffalo Bill affair and all of its physical and emotional trauma. So, the absence of his real enemy makes thematic sense, in addition to the actual business reasons that keep him out of the story. But without the surreal flourishes of Hannibal or the presence of Dr Lecter himself,

Clarice is a slightly above-average CBS criminal proceeding that stands out less for everything it does and more for its associations with better and more famous material. The fact that the show works at all – and on some occasions, mainly thanks to Breeds, really succeeds – is on the one hand a relief, given how easy it would be to screw up this material. But on the other, what is the point of telling a new story with this character (along with several other

Silence leftovers) and not try to do something special?The series begins in 1993, taking place approximately a year after the events of the book / movie. Setting the period is a wise choice, as serial killers and female FBI agents were still relative novelties at the time. The public and the media are figuring out how to talk about monsters like Buffalo Bill, while Clarice and her roommate Ardelia Mapp (Devyn Tyler) struggle to navigate an agency dominated by men who tolerate or barely understand them. . In a first episode titled “The Silence Is Over”, we learn that a psychologically marked Clarice has withdrawn from her public heroism to enter and analyze data in the Bureau’s behavioral science laboratory. Her self-exile ends when new Attorney General Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson) – mother of Catherine (Marnee Carpenter), whom Clarice rescued from Bill’s Dungeon – assigns her to an elite unit led by Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), a minor figure of

Silence . Clarice doesn’t want to be there, Krendler doesn’t trust her, and her teammates Esquivel (Lucca de Oliveira), Tripathi (Kal Penn) and Clarke (Nick Sandow) don’t quite know what to think of her. degrees.Breeds isn’t the first actor to try and fill Jodie Foster’s shoes in the role, as Julianne Moore played Clarice in the 2001 film. Hannibal

. Like his predecessors (especially Foster, as shot bySilence

director Jonathan Demme), she looks tiny next to her male peers like Cudlitz, which helps underline how out of place she seems in this work. The Breed West Virginia accent is passable enough not to be a distraction, and she plays an important role in playing a Clarice who is more broken than we’re used to, aware that she’s good at it. but hesitates to continue to do so in the wake of what she experienced in the Buffalo Bill affair. This show ignores the existence of the sequel

, which is a good thing for Paul Krendler, because in this film (in which the character was played by Ray Liotta) he suffers a particularly trying fate. The co-stars of the races are doing what they can in some pretty thankless roles so far. (Cudlitz, amazing on NBC / TNT crime drama Southland , draws blood from a stone in the role of Krendler, making him appear human even though his main function is to hype our heroine by constantly being wrong about her.) So she is the main attraction, and the Best parts of the series use it to dig deeper into the long-term emotional trauma these crimes might have on the people who investigate them. (Or, in the case of the now recluse Catherine Martin, those who survive physically but not psychologically.) The plots, however, are generic, as the series can’t decide if it wants to be the new one.

Criminal minds or something more. The main story arc changes the usual formula for this kind of show: Only Clarice thinks the big deal makes it. do not involve a serial killer, but a larger conspiracy that uses serial killer-style traps as a disguise, and no one wants to believe her at first. But the reversal doesn’t change things that much, and the second episode randomly assigns the team to a Waco-style seat at a resort in Tennessee where Clarice’s Applachian roots come in handy. It’s unclear whether Kurtzman and Lumet are trying to work against expectations or just aren’t interested in all of the now-too-familiar tropes about how the minds work of men like Buffalo Bill or Hannibal Lecter. Whatever the reason, their early approach only reinforces the question of why anyone would want to revisit this character and territory, without a strong and decisive stand. The show deploys a flat, desaturated visual style, and the few memorable images seem borrowed from one or the other.

Thesilenceofthelambs

(like a therapy session that begins with Clarice and her doctor in a very close-up, practically looking at the camera) or Hannibal