‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’: Ryan Murphy’s Latest Sensationalized Scandal Doesn’t Leave A Lasting Impact [Review]

In the wake of documentaries on Britney Spears, Lorena Bobbitt, and other victims of a crueler, “more misogynistic” press machine, the hook to these projects is a prodding at both individual and collective memory. They claim to be recontextualizations, revisions, and rehabilitations, while they are still fundamentally pieced together as amalgamations of fame and identity, with the involvement of the subject or not. There’s a thrill, I assume, in knowing where one was during or remembering the date of a particularly heinous invasion of privacy, an illusion of proximity to a person who has, regardless of their volition, become available to everyone on the planet. And that you can remember the same thing others do, recalling the kind of communal experience with tabloid journalism (especially if it intersects with something more serious), then that’s gold, an exciting form of connectivity across space and time. That must explain the existence of “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” the third season of the FX series produced by Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Alexis Martin Woodall, Sarah Burgess, Sarah Paulson, Brad Falchuk, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski and Michael Uppendahl, and developed for television by Burgess. Yes, there’s the titillation of do-gooding, setting the record straight and giving more context to events and attempting to illustrate certain players with greater depth, but, come on: do you remember where you were when Clinton (Clive Owen) said on national television that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky (Beanie Feldstein)? That question gives an intangible memory the fantasy of tactility. 

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“Impeachment: American Crime Story,” which details the lawsuit laboriously against Clinton filed by former Arkansas civil servant Paula Jones (Analeigh Ashford), the dynamic between Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson) and Lewinsky (the real-life Lewinsky served as a producer on the show), and Lewinsky’s negotiation of her dynamic with Clinton, is, in a way, maybe more successful than “Framing Britney Spears,” in that it executes its story without salaciousness. It does not sensationalize the relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton but rather attempts to frame it simultaneously as an abuse of power and as the eye of a storm stirred up by Conservatives (like Cobie Smulders) to undermine Democrats in power. But paradoxically, one can tell from the show’s tense music by Mac Quayle, its frosty color palette, and precocious yet utilitarian cinematography by Simon Dennis that the show wants you to engage in its drama. But maybe “Impeachment: American Crime Story”’s drama really isn’t all that interesting. 

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Scenes are dilated beyond their means, characters deliver exposition, and every shot and sequence announces its purpose. It’s not bad per se, but it is fairly boring, with only a handful of jokes here and there to lighten the mood. It never really sustains the tension of the kind of political drama it may aspire to be; it’s not as skilled as, say, Alan J. Pakula or Sydney Pollack. It hasn’t enough of a sharp, cynical edge wittily puncture power or the grace to adbridge things. It feels like being dragged, somewhat nonlinearly, through the whole scandal day by day, hour by hour, the tedium measured by the slow loading page on the Drudge Report. 

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Besides rehabilitation, “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” which is based on “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President” by Jeffrey Toobin, appears to be absent of a real perspective, or at least one that isn’t obvious. There’s potential throughout, though, implications of artistic rigor; Annaleigh Ashford is a highlight, her Paula Jones being painfully whipped around as political pawn when she’s sincerely in search of justice, without necessarily having the vocabulary to articulate what that might look like to her. In her quivering lip and uncertain eyes, Ashford gives Jones the humanity of someone who’s being exploited by another limb of society, but finds herself trapped when she was promised liberation. 

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But the show’s wavering commitment to a point of view beneath the surface is at its most frustrating when it focuses on the relationship between Lewinsky and Tripp. The two become closer, Lewinsky unphased by Tripp’s abrasive personality, Feldstein keeping her register high, and Paulson nearly barking her lines. Paulson’s performance is curious; she lumbers around, her voice spiked with shrapnel in every line, either portraying someone who doesn’t care if she hurts anyone or has stopped trying to control that impulse. But there’s a hint of desire there, as well, an envy in Lewinsky’s looks, youthfulness, and allure. At its worst, it skids closely to Ryan Murphy’s staid trope of the older woman done dirty by the patriarchal society around her who relentlessly covets youth and the desirability she had in the past. But, while Feldstein never really plays much more than the surface, leaving her Monica mostly weepy and whiny, Paulson is a strong enough performer to lend their dynamic an unsettling but entrancing eros about it. She repeats a variation of “you make me feel like a slob” whenever Monica tells Linda she’s been working out, and in certain scenes, Paulson’s eyes hunger: either for Monica herself or what Monica has (and is too naive to realize). A friendship with Sapphic flavors scalded by acid, a la “Jennifer’s Body.” In the fourth episode, they spend the duration on the phone with one another, one frame split between the two in their respective homes, but framed as if they could easily be in the same place, trading secrets and sharing themselves with one another. It looks like a shot from “When Harry Met Sally,” a startling intimacy between Lewinsky and Tripp that’s ready to crumble. But they’re too blind to see it. 

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“Impeachment: American Crime Story” feels a bit too busy trying desperately to say something about what happened, and be, ahem, unimpeachable in its accuracy, to let any of these relationships or characters breathe or live, running into the same wall that its freshman season, “The People vs. OJ Simpson,” did. While this season doesn’t seem as thirsty for people to fact-check it, it seems basically uninterested in the story as storytelling and popular art on their own terms, giving the show somewhat an obligatory tone. Besides its intermittent gestures towards a compelling take on the Tripp/Lewinsky relationship, it is dully anchored to the ground, not reeling doing much with the material itself. Smulders’ Coulter is an amusing drag version of the conservative pundit, an arch performance of someone who’s always giving a weird political performance. Still, there’s not enough of her in the seven episodes made available to critics for it to bear much on the work. The “American Crime Story” series has been, with the exception of the sophomore season “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” (Murphy’s masterpiece), become the provence of seriousness, tied to the kind of respectability that Murphy gleefully mocks in his other works, from “American Horror Story” to “The Politician.” At least when Murphy is unhinged, it’s marginally interesting, even relatively exciting, to see how he’ll provoke. It’s strange to see something agreed upon to be a significant point in political, journalistic, and broader public memory try to get ironed out as an event that can be clinically appraised, its even the high emotions embalmed in the house of “good revisionist tabloid culture.” Will anyone remember this, something that isn’t gallingly terrible or breathtakingly great, but just rather “meh”? And in the streaming era, will there be any chance of making a collective memory of the rehabilitation or reinvestigation into these people’s images tangible? Though I somewhat sympathize with the fairly deferential approach as a media mea culpa, at the expense of interesting television making, “Impeachment: American Crime Story” turns a spectacle into something banally respectable. [C]