Based on the novel by Laura Lippman and adapted for television by Alma Har’el, “Lady in the Lake” on Apple TV+ is a story about women’s ambition, and what happens when those aspirations are denied. Set in Baltimore, Maryland in 1966, the series revolves around two women. Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) is a Jewish housewife and mother desperate to break free from her monotonous existence, and chase her lifelong goal of becoming a journalist. Across town, Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), a young Black mother, is determined to make a better life for her two sons. However, as her husband Slappy (Byron Bowers) seeks his comedy dreams, Cleo is relegated to working as a department store window model, bartending and keeping the books for prolific gangster Shell Gordon (Wood Harris). Though the women initially live parallel lives, their worlds collide on Thanksgiving Day. Despite intriguing characters and settings, “Lady in the Lake” never becomes the noir thriller it could have been. Har’el buries the tale in puzzling surrealist moments. Consequently, Ingram’s Cleo is positioned as a bystander in her own story, allowing Portman’s Maddie to emerge as insufferable and obnoxious, achieving her goals at any cost.
Related Stories
“Lady in the Lake” opens with a horrific crime. After watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade, a girl goes missing, causing the community to spring into action. Barred from the search party and frustrated by her own idleness, Maddie snaps. Amid her outburst, she packs a suitcase, abandons her husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), and her teenage son Seth (Noah Jupe) and moves to The Bottom, Baltimore’s Black neighborhood. Fixated on proving herself, Maddie joins the search and discovers the girl’s body in the lake. She then uses her “heroism” as leverage to weasel her way into the newsroom at The Baltimore Star newspaper.
Popular on Variety
While Maddie is busy crafting her career, Cleo struggles to stay afloat. Needing to earn more money, she takes on a new role under Shell Gordon, which consequently leads to her demise. Invigorated by working at the newspaper and her living quarters in The Bottom, Maddie decides to use Cleo’s death to continue making headway in her career, but things don’t quite pan out as she expects. Though Portman and the entire cast are outstanding actors, Maddie is exhausting. So obsessed with centering herself and forging her path, she never stops to consider how her presence as a middle-class white woman upends the ecosystem of The Bottom, literally putting its Black residents in harm’s way. As a result, as the full scope of Maddie’s past comes to light, the audience is forced to bend and stretch to feel sympathy toward her.
“Lady in the Lake” is frustrating, because a powerful story sits at its foundation. Yet Har’el forces the viewer to dig through dizzying and unneeded exposition and strange sequences. Episode 6, “I know who killed Cleo Johnson,” is a baffling and off-the-rails segment. For its 45-minute runtime, viewers walk alongside Maddie through an overlong dream sequence. While the production design by JC Molina is vibrant, the textures and colors of Shiona Turini’s costumes shine, and hair and makeup by Jose Zamora and Claudia Humburg, respectively, are stellar, little is being said here. In fact, eliminating this episode would have made for a much sharper series overall.
Unfortunately, the show’s surrealist fragments flowing into the story choke the mystery out of the narrative. The drama works like two detailed tapestries, taped together in the final hour to create a full picture. As the limited series crams in countless details, the audience must examine too much at once, creating a state of delirium rather than the pulsating tone of a nail-biter.
Throughout time, women have paid a price for following their ambitions, especially in the eras prior to the Women’s Rights movement. In “Lady in the Lake,” Maddie and Cleo are resolved to get more out of life. Both women contend with rampant misogyny as they claw their way into new roles, but the series fails to sustain any suspenseful tension. Instead, it simply regurgitates what is already known. In the end, racism costs a great deal, whereas privilege (and whiteness) just might set you free.
The first two episodes of “Lady in the Lake” premiere July 19 on Apple TV+ with new episodes dropping weekly on Fridays.
