Rewatching Hannibal, and I’m reminded of a niggle I always had about the Miriam Lass storyline.
Should they not have been able to tell if her arm was removed posthumously? Or if it had been frozen at some point? They find the arm - which looks pretty ‘fresh’ for lack of a better term - and seem to take it as confirmation that she died two years before, and I can’t figure out why the question isn’t asked.
My unpopular opinion about Hannibal the TV show is that it ultimately falls victim to the same syndrome that Thomas Harris suffered from when writing Hannibal the book. What makes Red Dragon and the Silence of the Lambs such compelling reads is how grounded they are in many ways - they’re very close to being police procedurals (written at a time when that kind of police work was little known), but with the operaticly grotesque character of Lecter hovering around the sidelines, throwing everyone and everything off course. The juxtaposition of the mundane with the almost supernaturally evil gives the story a really fantastic source of dramatic friction.
Point being, for all that I enjoy the tv show (a lot more than Hannibal the book, it has to be said), when it shifts Hannibal out of that position, and into the role of romantic interest, the whole story structure collapses in on itself. It’s somewhat more plausible for Will Graham than for Clarice Starling, but the notion of either of them being ‘in love’ with Lecter is so outlandish that the characters have to be broken down (and the world around them has to be broken down) in ways that don’t feel possible for any actual human being. (My suspicion is that for both of them, the likely endpoint of the relationship is, just like Miriam, winding up abandoned and minus a limb or two, if they’re lucky).
It’s kind of like the insistence on turning Dracula into a romantic hero, which I also think breaks the moral structure of the book (but I’ll spare you all my Dracula rant).
Hence I love the first two seasons of Hannibal, and have pretty limited patience for the third. (Possibly the fact that we no longer get scenes in Hannibal’s beautiful office-library is part of that).
Anyway, Anna Chlumsky is so, so good as Not Clarice Starling in Hannibal, I always wish we got to see more of her before things get worse. She brings this very precise intelligence to the part - you really do feel that Miriam is a force to be reckoned with.
And, not for nothing, but it takes some doing to come into a show, act only against Laurence Fishburne and Mads Mikklesen and not only hold your own, but create an indelible impression.
They use Chlumsky’s size quite interestingly, I think - she’s dressed in a way to make her look bigger (the polo shirts!) right up until she walks into the room with Lecter, and we see that she’s wearing extremely high heels. In the moment when she’s being strangled, she almost looks like a doll he’s playing with. (A depiction that is rife with gendered overtones, I must admit).
Amy Brookheimer is all simmering intensity, raging anxiety forcibly tamped down into an effort at stillness - but Miriam Lass moves like someone who has more confidence in her own capabilities, more secure in moving through the world. It’s why I’ve always enjoyed how physical a performer she is.
Side note - the backstory here is that Lecter was, at some point, an emergency room doctor. I’ve watched enough medical dramas to find that very unlikely - it just seems like such a messy medical speciality for someone so fastidious.
Hugh Dancy definitely needed that scruff they gave him in this - without it, he’d look about 14.
I love Laurence Fishburne’s voice - I could listen to him say just about anything. (The soul patch, however, I cannot approve of).
