‘Clarice’: Agent of the ‘Silence of the Lambs’ is not due to you

Two long shadows hover Clarice, the new CBS drama following FBI agent Clarice Starling in the aftermath of her confrontation with serial killer Buffalo Bill. The first shadow is cast by The Silence of the innocents, the 1991 film that won the five Oscar categories that year, including the Oscar for Best Actress for Jodie Foster as Clarice. The second shadow comes from cannibal, the NBC drama about the much more iconic killer of Silence, cannibal psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter.

Thirty years later, Silence the undisputed masterpiece of the serial killer drama genre remains: frightening, darkly comical and psychologically complex in ways that avoid fetishizing the murderers themselves, even if much of Anthony Hopkins’s dialogue soon became part of the national lexicon. It’s so good in almost every way that the most successful creative films and programs set in this world had to approach the material very differently. The style of cannibal

it was so baroque, sometimes bordering on science fiction, that it looked like nothing anyone had tried before. (It was also a small miracle that such a strange and bloody program aired for three seasons on a broadcast network, even though NBC got the program for a low price through international distributor Gaumont.) The material about Buffalo Bill skinning his victims so that he could dress in a feminine suit has always been problematic, and it has definitely not aged well, although the film strives to argue that Bill was not transgender.

Clarice he largely tries to get around the issue when his crimes are discussed.Film and TV rights for Red Dragon, the book by Thomas Harris that presented Hannibal, and Silence of the innocents , who introduced Clarice, were sold separately, which at the moment means that the two characters can no longer appear in the same adaptation. cannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller hoped to solve this problem in order to use Clarice in a potential fourth season. Instead, she is the main attraction of this new show, Star Trek: Discoveryproducers Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet. Although it often makes reference to events of

Silence , Lecter cannot be mentioned by name, and he is only mentioned once, when Clarice’s current therapist (Shawn Doyle) points out that his last “was a prisoner in a hospital for insane criminals”. Clarice it’s a lot about his title character’s attempts (played here by Australian actress Rebecca Breeds) to separate himself from the Buffalo Bill affair and all of his physical and emotional trauma. Therefore, the absence of his true enemy makes some thematic sense, in addition to the commercial motives of real life that are keeping him out of history. But without the surreal flourishes of cannibal or the presence of Dr. Lecter himself,

Clarice it is a slightly above average criminal procedure for CBS, less distinguished for anything it does than for its associations with better and more famous material. The fact that the show works – and on some occasions, mainly thanks to the Breeds, really works – is on the one hand a relief, given the ease with which it would be to mess up this material. On the other hand, what is the point of telling a new story with this character (along with several others

Silence remnants) and not trying to do something special?The series begins in 1993, set about a year after the events of the book / film. The definition of the period is a smart choice, because both serial killers and female FBI agents were still relative news at that 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) are struggling to navigate an agency dominated by men who barely tolerate or understand them. In a debut episode entitled “The Silence Is Over”, we learn that a psychological scarred Clarice has moved away from her public heroism to do data entry and analysis in the Bureau’s behavioral science lab. Her self-exile ends when the new attorney general Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson) – Catherine’s mother (Marnee Carpenter), whom Clarice rescued from Bill’s dungeon – assigns her to an elite unit run by Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), a secondary figure of

Silence . Clarice doesn’t want to be there, Krendler doesn’t trust her and her companions Esquivel (Lucca de Oliveira), Tripathi (Kal Penn) and Clarke (Nick Sandow) are not sure what to do with her, varying degrees.Breeds is not the first actor to try to replace Jodie Foster in that role, as Julianne Moore played Clarice in the 2001 film cannibal

. Like its predecessors (particularly Foster, filmed bySilence

director Jonathan Demme), she looks tiny next to her male colleagues like Cudlitz, which helps to emphasize how out of place she seems to be in this job. The breed’s West Virginia accent is acceptable enough to not be a distraction, and she does a great job playing a Clarice who is more broken than we are used to, aware that she is good at this job, but reluctant to keep doing it following what she experienced in the Buffalo Bill case. This show is ignoring the existence of the sequel

, which is a good thing for Paul Krendler, since in that film (in which the character was played by Ray Liotta), he suffers a fate especially of turning his stomach. Breed co-stars do what they can in very ungrateful roles so far. (Cudlitz, incredible in the NBC / TNT police drama Southland , draws blood from a stone like Krendler, making him look human, although his main function is to exaggerate our heroine, being constantly wrong about her.) So she is the main attraction, and the best parts of the series use her to dig deeper in the long-term emotional trauma that these crimes can have on the people who investigate them. (Or, in the case of the now reclusive Catherine Martin, about 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

Criminal minds or something else. The main arc of the story takes a turn in the usual formula for this type of show: Clarice is the only one who thinks the big case does no they involve a serial killer, but a bigger conspiracy that uses serial killer-style traps as a cover, and nobody wants to believe it at first. But the inversion doesn’t change things much, and the second episode randomly designates the team for a Waco-style siege in a Tennessee compound where Clarice’s Applachian roots are useful. It is unclear whether Kurtzman and Lumet are trying to work against expectations or are simply not so interested in all the now overly familiar tropes of how the minds of men like Buffalo Bill or Hannibal Lecter work. Whatever the reason, his initial approach only reinforces the question of why someone would want to revisit this character, and this terrain, without a strong and decisive approach to him. The program has a flat and desaturated visual style, and the few memorable images seem to be borrowed

Silence of the innocents

(like a therapy session that starts with Clarice and her doctor in extreme close-up, practically looking at the camera) or cannibal