The director Alma Har’el rose to fame with the deeply moving documentaries Bombay Beach and Love True. The former offered an interesting look at the communities and individuals living by the shores of a retreating Salton Sea. The genre-bending finesse of Love True was hailed as outstanding. Both films won several awards, bringing Har’el enough glare to have her invited onto Shia LaBeouf’s Honey Boy. Har’el released three films in a row that exposed her as a filmmaker who always seemed to be looking beneath our sides for what lies beneath.
This is why Lady in the Lake on Apple TV+ becomes such an opportunity to continue her great work. Among other things, it is based on the 2019 Laura Lippman bestseller of the same name. It is a gripping noirish novel about Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife from Baltimore during the 1960s who decides to become a journalist after an 11-year-old girl dies mysteriously. However, when another death occurs – this time a black woman aged 33 whose body is found floating in water – Maddie swears she will find out what really happened but she must confront her own past first.
Sounds exciting right — in theory at least? But this show becomes far too submerged in swampy madness early on almost drowning by episode three. There are redeeming qualities for those who hold out until later episodes but it will take constant care and dedication through it all. Is this “lady” worth waiting for?
In short: yes; although I suspect you’ll either love or don’t get into this series at all. On Apple TV+, contrasting Lady in the Lake with another neo-noir thriller called Sugar (starring Colin Farrell) reveals how frenziedly choppy it can be before finally luring you into its fold. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that lady here you are reading me so sit tight for little.
Certainly, Maddie’s character played by Natalie Portman is a mess. On Thanksgiving Day, a prompt of young Jewish girl going missing and later found dead in the lake shocks Baltimore and unleashes something in Maddie. You don’t know why exactly. Yeah, you can feel there’s some element of her past related to this one. Maybe. But watching Portman come apart – as much fun as that sounds – doesn’t intrigue so much as it does unsettle Moses Ingram does better as Cleo, a department store employee who briefly intersects with Maddie’s path early in the series; she provides voiceover for most of the caper.
However, those two women would never know how tightly their lives were twisted around each other.
The first few episodes are steeped in Maddie’s extreme drive to become a journalist again. It seems like it was just plucked out from thin air but we will go along with it anyway. There must be a reason why Maddie wants this so bad to walk away from her marriage life and risk further damaging her relationship with her son during his teenage years (Noah Jupe offering a fine turn).
Then the series turns into a kind of monotone exercise, which demonstrates to the viewer that there is no good in chasing your dreams recklessly. To understand how these deaths took place, Maddie will stop at nothing even if it puts too many people at risk. Even Maddie’s alliance with police officer Ferdie (a strong Y’lan Noel) is put to the test. How could she walk into a newsroom and get a job with not much experience is baffling. It’s all about Maddie trying to prove herself and become somebody.
But Har’el is an inquisitive filmmaker, who does offer up her own twist on noir here, mostly by making it more female driven as opposed to being about a femme fatale. Instead of being a femme fatale, the story goes off another way — woman (Maddie) as savior? She hopes. And this is one of those great touches where Har’el expands from her source material.
Other shining elements include production design, sets, costumes and cast. It’s actually an amazing ensemble that brings together various characters into a tale that also delves deeply into the racial divide of its era. There’s gangster Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), shady drug dealer Reggie (Josiah Cross), and journalist Bob Bauer Pruitt Taylor Vince who gives Maddie a chance. Moses Ingram’s Cleo emerges as the most interesting character in this whole ensemble though. We have still got to find out how she wound up dead in that lake.
For those wanting their noir tale served up with lots of twists, they can be found here aplenty enough. They are teasing you – hanging creative carrots on sticks – perhaps hiding some gaps within disjointedness found in series themselves…. The last episode had what we thought was a decent payoff but there were plenty of swatting away creative flies along the way that tended to diminish the central mystery surrounding the dead girl and woman.
Like “Marcia” before her, it’s Maddie, Maddie, Maddie. That can become tiring. But Portman is always captivating and after all we are not really supposed to love this woman. In that sense, Portman has done what she was hired for. However, one wonders if yet another episode would have provided more opportunity to flesh things out a bit more fully; as it stands now the concept of Lady in the Lake carries the show more than the reality itself.
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