The phrase “cinematic universe” gets thrown around pretty liberally these days…but is it perhaps time to say that Thomas Harris has one? His novels have been adapted into five films, one of which—The Silence of the Lambs—won not just best picture at the Oscars, but that year’s four other top awards as well. This week will see the premiere of the second TV series based on his characters, as Clarice arrives on CBS Thursday—and with it, the third actor to take on the role of Clarice Starling in less than 35 years. Maybe that doesn’t sound like very many, but in the same period, we’ve only had five live-action Supermen.
Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, which aired on NBC from 2013 to 2015 (and is currently streaming on Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime), relocated its eponymous protagonist to the present day, dressed him in wide tie knots and rich jewel tones, and composed his kills as meticulously as Botticelli tableaux. It’s generally remembered as one of the queerest, most transgressive shows ever to air on network television—and if Will (Hugh Dancy) and Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) never actually made out, it sure felt like they did. Clarice, on the other hand, does everything it can to transport us back to the world of Silence, short of casting as its lead a Mandalorian-style CGI-de-aged Jodie Foster.
Series co-creator Jenny Lumet collaborated previously with Silence director Jonathan Demme on 2008’s Rachel Getting Married, and her show is clearly reverent of his blueprint. It restages shots from the movie: Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, filmed from behind, sewing a woman suit out of his victims’ skins; his last abductee, Catherine Martin, screaming for help from the bottom of a well in his basement. It uses the same title treatment. It’s also a period piece, picking up in 1993, a year after the events of Silence—though thorny rights issues prevent Clarice from mentioning Hannibal Lecter by name, for the same reason Hannibal couldn’t mention Clarice.
The Clarice of Clarice (Rebecca Breeds) is having a hard time. She’s recovering from the trauma of saving Catherine from Buffalo Bill, which was compounded by the FBI’s institutional failures (as the film established, the Bureau’s higher-ups disregarded her instincts and sent her to investigate Gumb without backup). She’s been ordered into therapy with a shrink (Shawn Doyle) intent on shaming her into opening up to him; she knows not to trust him even before she finds out he’s telling her boss what she says in their sessions. Then she gets from former senator Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson), Catherine’s mother—who’s just been appointed Attorney General.
Ruth tells her that two more women have been violently murdered by an apparent serial killer, one she wants Clarice to investigate. Clarice knows she can’t refuse.
The challenge of making a show about law enforcement in 2021 is to resist selling the audience old clichés about the nobility of police work. Clarice avoids this trap: it’s one of the bleakest portrayals of crime investigation I’ve ever seen on American television. Clarice has a theory about the plot’s supposed serial killer—but basically everyone above her at Justice refuses to credit it, with horrifying results. In episode 2, Ruth cuts a deal with a crooked local officer, and tries to make Clarice feel good about it by noting the political dividends it will pay later. Other cop shows acknowledge the existence of bad apples. On Clarice, though, the good agents are vastly in the minority, fighting both criminals and the systemic corruption of the Justice Department.
Clarice’s identity and character derive largely from the ways in which she doesn’t fit the stereotype of a Fed—“male, pale, and Yale,” as a fictional agent memorably described it on another recent TV series, The Flight Attendant. She’s young; she’s female; unlike the Australian actor who plays her on Clarice, she’s from Appalachia. Breeds labors mightily in the role, but she is not quite convincing as a single-minded, self-abnegating workaholic who lives on ramen and orange soda. The template Foster set for the character, in her Oscar-winning performance, is so firmly fixed in the audience’s minds that anyone would have a hard time dislodging it; not even Julianne Moore really could.
Much more compelling are the show’s supporting cast: Atkinson as careerist gorgon Ruth, continually demanding PR “wins” no matter the costs to real people’s lives, and incapable of relating to her own deeply traumatized daughter; The Walking Dead’s Michael Cudlitz as Paul Krendler, a Justice Department lawyer called in to work on the task force who gradually realizes that the Bureau is not actually a force for good; and Devyn A. Tyler as Ardelia, Clarice’s trainee pal, who’s now working in cold cases and is not given nearly enough to do in the three episodes provided to critics.
Inasmuch as Clarice dramatizes what it’s like to be a woman in a sexist field, and a person from a disadvantaged background trying to advance in her career without leaning too much on self-interested mentors, the series is an appropriate sequel to The Silence Of The Lambs — and certainly a better one than the 2001 feature film Hannibal, which was less interested in those ideas. But in order to reach the artistic heights the Hannibal TV series did, Clarice will have to step out from Silence Of The Lambs’s shadow and stop trying so hard to ape Demme’s style. The rot at the heart of large and powerful institutions, the myth of class mobility, the trauma that a horror like the disastrous siege of Waco would cause to those who executed it — they’re all subjects worth exploring. But they’re also huge topics that didn’t have to be shoehorned into the Thomas Harris Cinematic Universe; one hopes Clarice will continue making its case for why they’re there.
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