Original caricature by Jeff York of Natalie Portman in LADY IN THE LAKE (copyright 2024).
When it comes to Natalie Portman’s career, you can probably count on one hand how many confident, upbeat characters she’s played. Her specialty is smart, nuanced portrayals of very troubled and self-doubting protagonists, be it in THE PROFESSIONAL, BLACK SWAN, or JACKIE. Even her turn in a couple of STAR WARS movies was filled with strife. Here, Portman continues to manifest such neuroses while also examining the subjects of sexism, racism, corruption, and infidelity circa 1966 in the striking new miniseries LADY IN THE LAKE on Apple TV+. She gives an edgy performance – jittery, strident, brows constantly furrowing – equaled by the angsty ensemble around her, making for one of 2024’s most tense and involving shows.
Portman plays Maddie Schwartz, an upper-middle-class Jewish housewife who’s had enough of her controlling husband (Brett Gelman), moody teen son (Noah Jupe), and a circus of nagging friends and neighbors. She’s settled into a suffocating existence, putting her dreams of being a writer far away up on the shelf. But Maddie breaks free from her dead-end world after her husband berates her over an improperly prepared kosher meal and she furiously packs up to walk out on him.
Maddie secures a grubby apartment, no small feat considering the times required her husband to sign the lease, but soon she’s cooling her heels, enjoying the first taste of freedom in her adult life, and even making fast friends with local bohemian Judith Weinstein (Mikey Madison). Together, out for a walk, the two women discover the corpse of the local Jewish girl who had gone missing, and suddenly, Maddie sees a chance to become a reporter to cover the story. She talks her way into working for the local paper’s editor Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vance) and soon enough, she’s even cozying up to a black policeman named Ferdie Platt (Y’lan Noel) to get more information about the dead girl’s case. He’s also charming and handsome, but Maddie’s ambitions take precedence.
Matters get even more complicated as Maddie knows the dead girl, not to mention her narrative starts to be mirrored by another restless Baltimore woman named Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram). Cleo is juggling a lot, come-ons from all the men at the bar where she works, the constant battle that is being a single mother, and even moonlighting as a bag lady for some local hoods. To add even more to Coco’s resume, she narrates the series, from beyond the grave it would seem as she tells us she’s the title character. It all makes for the most cryptic of narration since Joe Gillis told us his story from a watery swimming pool grave in SUNSET BLVD.
Soon, all of the events of Coco’s life, shown in a multitude of flashbacks, will crisscross with all the machinations of Maddie’s life too for a series that demands your attention every second. Writer/director Alma Har’el and her cadre of writers have adapted Laura Lippman’s 2019 detective novel and ensured it’s chock full of details, red herrings, themes big and small, and a mystery that only seems to get more mysterious with each of the show’s seven hours.
All the while, the characters are as difficult to pin down as the plot maneuvers. Everyone is complex, often acting in surprising ways, and that makes for a procedural, unlike most others you’ve seen before. Maddie herself is hardly the typical protagonist and no blossoming butterfly. Instead, she’s quite selfish, ruthlessly ambitious at times, and not above using her sex to get what she wants. Maddie is driven by a purpose to right wrongs, true, but it’s amazing how many wrongs she’s willing to enact to achieve her lofty goals.
The same goes for Cleo. She is a victim of dismissive men, a bigoted Baltimore society, and all the corruption that comes with a sleazy underworld, but she’s never quite the innocent bystander this character would be painted as in most other stories. Ingram plays it sly too, often holding her character’s cards close to the vest so we don’t know precisely what she’s thinking or will do. It all makes for two lead female characters as hard to pin down as any since perhaps Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett in NOTES ON A SCANDAL from 2006.
Har’el does a superior job of managing all the story threads, vast cast, and production details. She gets noir, yet rarely resorts to the tired tropes of it. Lippman’s original novel enjoyed many POV chapters from the multitude of characters to get across all of the varied perspectives, but that device would have made all this too expansive. Instead, Har’el relies upon fantasy and dream sequences to add further commentary to the varied proceedings.
The story never lets up in its bleakness, presenting the period and people in that time as dark, sinister, and often reprehensible. But ultimately, the thread of survival elevates what could have been merely a stone-cold murder tale. Despite the flaws, both Maddie and Coco have a spirit to them, determined to rise above their lots in life, no matter what it takes to climb out of the muck. We may not agree with all they do, but their choices make for provocative maneuvers that make this miniseries captivating, challenging, and full of surprises.
