Review: Clarice Is the Hoary Flipside of The Silence of the Lambs

The show's hacky obviousness couldn’t be any further removed from the ethos of Jonathan Demme’s seminal 1991 thriller.

Clarice
Photo: Brooke Palmer

At certain angles, Rebecca Breeds looks a little like Jodie Foster, and she’s capable of affecting a passable West Virginia accent. But CBS’s Clarice, which picks up one year after the events depicted in The Silence of the Lambs, seems concerned that audiences aren’t going to be able to connect the series to Jonathan Demme’s seminal thriller without Hannibal Lecter, who’s persona non grata here due less to any storytelling decision than some knotty rights issues. To compensate, Clarice abounds in a grab bag of minor characters from the 1991 film, as well as visual echoes to it that are so obvious—right down to the bold title font—that they alternate between insulting and comedic.

Attorney General Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson), the mother of Buffalo Bill’s last intended victim, reassigns F.B.I. agent Clarice Starling (Breeds) to the bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) in Washington, D.C. under Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), a more significant character in Thomas Harris’s source novel than he was in the film. Clarice’s confidante from the F.B.I. academy, Ardelia Mapp (Devyn A. Tyler), happens to work in D.C. and has offered her a place to stay. Even Bill’s poodle, Precious, manages to return in the custody of Ruth’s traumatized daughter, Catherine (Marnee Carpenter).

Despite her first-hand field experience, Clarice is very much still a rookie, which makes her an uneasy fit for the TV-ready police procedural team at ViCAP. Talented though she may be, she faces pushback from Krendler and the elder Martin when hesitant to do things like simply label the first episode’s pair of murders as the work of another serial killer.

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The first of three episodes of Clarice provided to press for review opens with a stilted catch-up of what happened in The Silence of the Lambs while throwing in a “lotion in the basket” crack at the halfway point for good measure. The series does dial back on the references to Demme’s film in the next two episodes, but they’re no less saddled with faux-profound, punchy lines that the actors fail to sell. Clarice says that she is, rather than a captive Rapunzel, “out of the tower now,” and later, Catherine howls, “You think you can rewrite the story, but you can’t!” The series is constantly stating the obvious, giving shallow psychological play-by-plays that culminate in such hoary chestnuts as “He’s playing us!” The sinister dynamic between Clarice and Hannibal that hinged on her reluctantly sharing details about her past in exchange for information here translates to her offering up bog-standard anecdotes about her life that eventually loop back around to being relevant to the task at hand near the end of an episode.

This hacky obviousness couldn’t be any further from the ethos of the film, which conveys so much through shrewd compositions and the actors’ subtle facial expressions. The film makes us feel how men’s eyes are always on Clarice, as well as her stature in comparison to them, and we intuitively grasp how her pursuit of Buffalo Bill is in part an attempt to prove her worth. By contrast, we know the men of the series resent her because characters are constantly telling us as much. We also know that she has PTSD because she’s plagued with jittery flashbacks—to Death’s-head moths and the late Buffalo Bill sewing his skin suit in the nude—daccompanied by screechy horror music. It’s easy to imagine a version of The Silence of the Lambs conceived by the team behind this series, stopping at regular intervals to lay out its themes and constantly cutting to sinister images of bleating lambs to underscore Clarice’s trauma.

And yet, for all its problems, Clarice manages to not completely sink the idea of a series centered around Clarice Starling. The writers make the aftermath of the Buffalo Bill incident, namely its effects on a variety of characters, seem like potentially fertile ground for a sustained exploration of transcending trauma. Clarice is uncomfortable about getting back to business as usual, while Catherine has retreated into an obsessive workout regime, eating very little and refusing to leave her home. Meanwhile, Ruth has leveraged her daughter’s kidnapping for political gain; though her heart is ostensibly in the right place, she’s very much willing to make compromises for the sake of headlines and favors. These are some potentially interesting threads to mine, but it’ll take much steadier, subtler hands than the ones that crafted these episodes to convincingly sew them together.

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Score: 
 Cast: Rebecca Breeds, Michael Cudlitz, Lucca De Oliveira, Kal Penn, Nick Sandow, Devyn A. Tyler, Marnee Carpenter, Jayne Atkinson  Network: CBS

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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