‘The Lady in the Lake’ Review: Natalie Portman’s Mystery on Apple TV+ Has a Lot to Say, for Better and Worse

Recent Apple TV+ historical series have a recurring “Whose story is this?” problem: an awareness of the dangers of monochromatic approaches to history, with no clear idea of ​​how to solve the problem.

The Masters of the Airfor example, turned the Tuskegee Airmen into a footnote to an episode in a series about the 100th Bomb Group, doing no service to either narrative. Chemistry classThe show’s efforts to create a civil rights-related side story arc that wasn’t in the source material were a bit more successful — Aja Naomi King even received an Emmy nomination — but certainly didn’t feel organic. The big cigar I never knew whether I wanted this to be a show about Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party or about obliging white Hollywood producers; instead, it served neither story particularly well.

Subtext becomes text in Apple TV+’s new seven-part limited series The Lady of the Lakeadapted by Alma Har’el (Darling, my boy) based on the novel by Laura Lippman. It’s an entire series about a woman whose initially noble attempt to reclaim her personal narrative becomes something solipsistic when she fails to recognize that she’s overwriting, or simply ignoring, the narratives of the people around her.

Har’el, who directed every episode and wrote or co-wrote much of the series, has crafted an ambitious portrait of the unexpected pitfalls of self-realization, provocatively fleshing out some of the more difficult nuances of Lippman’s book. There are so many complicated things happening, or at least attempted, in The Lady of the Lake I feel petty in mentioning that what Har’el fails at is what seems ostensibly simpler: focusing on the riddle of of which the story of the series is, The Lady of the Lake loses track of What The story is this: most of the book’s momentum has been lost in this translation, which I find quite interesting and worthy of note, but rarely compelling and entertaining.

The story begins in 1966 Baltimore. Natalie Portman plays Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife who magically turns her life upside down and leaves her comfortable suburban home to move away from her husband (Milton, played by Brett Gelman) and son (Seth, played by Noah Jupe). We know Maddie is unhappy because television has led us to believe that a woman married to a character played by Brett Gelman (poor Brett Gelman) is rarely happy. But everyone in the story is baffled, especially when Maddie moves into a shabby apartment in Baltimore’s black neighborhood.

Maddie, who leaves with no source of income and no idea what she wants to do with her new life, soon focuses on the case of a missing Jewish girl. When she and a friend (Mikey Madison’s Judith) find the girl’s body, Maddie takes the opportunity to write for the Baltimore Starbecause journalism was apparently an aspiration thwarted by a horrible situation in his past.

And when Cleo Johnson’s (Moses Ingram) body is discovered in a fountain, Maddie makes it her mission to solve the case, much to the chagrin of her editors (who don’t care about black lives), the black cop she’s been seeing on the sly (Ferdie Platt, played by Y’lan Noel) and Cleo herself, who sarcastically recounts the story from beyond the grave.

I’m able to break it down so clearly because that’s the plot of Lippman’s book, which illustrates Maddie’s myopia by alternating chapters between Maddie’s perspective and the perspectives of the individuals she interacts with in different circumstances—people whose personal stories she’s unable to imagine or understand for herself. Maddie isn’t the villain of Lady at the lakee, but she is convinced that she is the heroine and that is not the case.

While Cleo also narrates some of the book, it’s mostly in the context of irritation at having her story appropriated by someone whose empathy is inherently suspect. Har’el has reconfigured that structure to give Cleo a larger role—perhaps not 50-50 with Portman, but close.

In many ways, it’s a good choice, as Ingram is fierce and compelling. Expanding Cleo’s presence gives us more time with Baltimore numbers runner, club owner and political fixer Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), his shady right-hand man Reggie (Josiah Cross, previously seen in the aforementioned Tuskegee Airmen episode of The Masters of the Air) and Cleo’s stand-up comedian husband (Byron Bowers’ Slappy), who is anachronistic and alien to her. The plot between them could be better, and at times it stagnates the series as a whole, but I appreciate the choice.

This allows Har’el to delve deeper into the similarities and differences between these two women and, in doing so, explore in greater detail the different stigmas associated with being black and Jewish in 1960s Maryland, layers of powerlessness and voicelessness compounded by being a woman.

Maddie can pass; a running joke in the early episodes is that she doesn’t look Jewish. Cleo can’t pass, but she can become invisible—figuratively—which is more of a mortal inconvenience than a superpower. Who can pass? Who can assimilate? And what do you leave behind when you do? How long do you carry the trauma of your powerlessness—especially in the case of Maddie and her family, when genocide is only a generation in your past?

It’s a difficult subject, and Har’el tackles it in a way that is disconcerting and, at her best, inspiring. The Lady of the Lake is imbued with a dream logic, reflecting how disconnected Maddie and Cleo are from the concrete world around them. They are haunted by nightmares and haunted by their pasts. The lines between memory and surrealism keep blurring, resulting in a season finale that is almost a hallucinatory modern dance piece—music by Marcus Norris, soundtracked by standards by Peggy Lee, Shirley Bassey, and Nina Simone—with shades of both the fragmented quality of Darling, my boy and the swirling disorientation of Har’el’s documentary Bombay BeachIt all sits on a beautifully mounted depiction of 1960s Baltimore, full of impeccable costumes and production design choices.

I wasn’t always sure what Har’el was trying was effective, but the show is bold in a way few shows attempt to be. As the story weaves together racism and anti-Semitism, images of slavery and references to the Holocaust, The Lady of the Lake is a series that easily leaves an impression. But somewhere along the way, it’s the story, whatever story it is about, that gets lost.

Unlike the hero of Chemistry classA much less nuanced version of a very similar plot, Maddie isn’t supposed to walk into a newsroom and be a natural just because she’s telling the truth. But there’s a difference between treating her dream as the unconvincing thing it is and treating it as an afterthought in the plot. (See also Maddie’s relationship with Platt, another thing that isn’t necessarily meant to be convincing, but could at least be decidedly unconvincing.)

Portman spent much of her youth playing projections of femininity rather than characters – think Beautiful girls, The professional, State of the garden, Closer — usually reserved for male writers and directors. Her work has become more interesting because she has been able to play complex characters who are trapped in equally artificial concepts — the obsession with ballet Black Swanthe fragile reputation of Jackiethe actor’s posture of May December.

Here, she plays a woman who has been playing a role for decades and, ultimately choosing to be “herself,” doesn’t know who or what that means. Just as her career as a journalist can’t be instantly believable, Maddie can’t be instantly believable. Is it supposed to be immersive when Portman plays the 17-year-old version of herself? No. It’s the person she’s trying to be, stuck in the person she was. Is her Baltimore accent (which is sure to prompt a lot of “Are Baltimore and Philadelphia accents the same?” questions) supposed to be jarring in a show where very few other actors have that accent? Yes, because even where Maddie belongs, she doesn’t fully belong.

Portman and Maddie are uncomfortable, and it stands out — intentionally, I would say — from the more naturalistic performances of the rest of the ensemble, including the likeable and flighty Madison, the almost too enigmatic Cross, the naturally smooth Harris and the utterly disconcerting Dylan Arnold as a pet store employee who becomes a suspect in both murders.

Portman doesn’t reconcile the character’s inconsistencies and thorny sides, but she accepts them and embodies them at that intellectual level on which the series plays best. I wish the disparate pieces The Lady of the Lake The book came together a little better, working as an essay, a tone poem, and a thriller. But I still found its aspirations, unevenly realized, admirable.