The Silence of the Lambs becomes another bland procedural.
Clariceembarrasses itself right away.
It’s one year since the FBI rookie hunted the skinsuited maniac Buffalo Bill.
Brooke Palmer/CBS
It’s a clip reel of fan serviced trauma.
Goodbye horses, hello reboot.
Her self-imposed isolation ends when the Attorney General calls.
The AG asks Starling to join the Violent Crimes Apprehension Unit.
Here, it’s a squad of grimaces led by Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz).
That’s all for character development.
A broadcast web link must have standards, after all.
Claricewants to balance weekly cases and a serialized mystery, plus an in-depth portrait of Clarice’s own psyche.
Those bite marks match wounds on two other victims.
Is ViCAP hunting a psychopath or is that just what a non-crazy killerwantsthem to think?
At dramatic moments, Clarice hallucinates a very funny-looking computer-animated moth.
Meanwhile, all the FBI agents stand around like fifth bananas.
“, “This is not good,” and “Ewwww.”
Yet this workaround carries a compelling possibility.
All of this material was covered inSilence, and the early additions here don’t indicate much imagination.
But you could see new resonance in the central trauma narrative.
She responds by listing his victims: “Their names are more important.”
Now she’s an agoraphobe whose mere presence pulls Starling back into their shared nightmare.
Claricewants to rewrite its own story.
And worth pointing out that Lumet wroteRachel Getting Married, one of the late Demme’s final films.
Everything aboutClaricehas been done, successfully and terribly and constantly, by a whole generation of CBS procedurals.
When that version of CBS tried for sexy violence, the results looked like a midlife crisis.
Pale imitations just copied the grotesquerie, which is one sick joke ofClarice’s prologue.
Three decades post-Silence, skin-sewing and bloody gutshots and malevolent torture are a part of the CBS brand identity.
I don’t mind gross extremity, butClaricewants shock value to cover up its sins against basic narrative sense.
Well, that was easy.
In the secondandthird episodes, Starling interrogates shady suspects until they just suddenly start confessing to major crimes.
I get that she’s supposed to be a brilliant reader of people.
Logic doesn’t need to matter.
WhereasClarice’s grayscale self-seriousness is an offense to pop culture history.
This is not good.
Starling herself runs afoul of fratty feds who torment her with rather specific chauvinist pranks.
Paul Krendler, a secret nice guy?
you could’t blame Cudlitz for being likable; “cuddle” is practically his last name.
Ron Vawter played him in theLambsmovie, a minor character granted a major introduction.
So Krendler’s meant to be a stark contrast to the film’s actual hero.
He’s a phantom of the Bureau’s terrorizing past or just another dumb G-man off the assembly line.
Doped out of his mind, Krendler says grace.
Somehow, he uses the prayer to insult Starlingandflirt with her.
Dr. Lecter sardonically compliments him: “Even the Apostle Paul couldn’t have done better.
He hated women, too.”
Hoover bad, Catholicism bad: Maybe this is all too heavy for the web connection airing two worshipfulFBIshows.
Notably,Clarice’s second episode centers on an explicitly Waco-esque standoff with a secessionist militia.
But this is a version of Waco where nice and noble federal agents do a swell job.
CBS did find room in its soul for the gleefully irreverentEvil.
That’s a lot of money made off other people’s originality.
His participation makesClaricefeel even more like a dastardly act of franchise capitalism.
(Spoiler alert: Yes!)
Foster’s Clarice battled personal demons and professional animosity, too.
Breeds subtracts all the swagger from the sorrow, a decision that matchesClarice’s colorless visual palette.
There’s a conspiracy subplot that could build somewhere, with multiple murders connected upward to corporate malfeasance.
In the third episode, the team tries to get an assassin to reveal his secrets.
Clarice figures out the prisoner was a sniper.
What lucky coincidence that ViCAP has its own army sniper guy, Esquivel (Lucca De Oliveira).
Clarice looks on from outside, her expository dialogue underlining the criminal’s wild overreactions.
“Hold on, he’s blinking!”
she says, and “His voice just pitched higher!”
At least be a nice cannibal and add some flavoring.D+
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