Natalie Portman comes to TV in a haunting, flawed but fascinating, adaptation of Laura Lippman's '60s-set murder mystery
“When a woman finally goes into the attic of her life and finds lost lies, misplaced memories, broken promises, she realizes how dangerous she was to those around her who believed she knew herself.” So says Cleo Johnson, in a lilting voiceover that colors the 1960s-set Apple TV+ crime drama Lady in the Lake. Narration can be a crutch for book-to-screen adaptations; the show is based on executive producer Laura Lippman’s 2019 novel of the same name. But used artfully—and sparingly—as it is here, rather than as a lazy conduit for exposition, it can deepen a story’s psychological profile. In this case, Cleo’s words are arresting because they so perfectly describe the twin identity crises at the center of this murder mystery. They’re haunting, too, because the very first thing Cleo tells us about, in the series’ opening scene, is her own death.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Lady in the Lake, a seven-part miniseries premiering on July 19, takes the shape of a neo-noir whodunit. But hidden within that shadowy aesthetic is, among other compelling themes, an ambitious deconstruction of the genre. The femmes fatales, the victims, and the heroes are the same people; both of the leads, The Queen’s Gambit breakout Moses Ingram’s Cleo and Natalie Portman’s Maddie Schwartz, contain all of those archetypes, yet neither understands the person she really is. Though she sometimes errs toward the dreamy and diaphanous at the cost of coherence, creator, writer, and director Alma Har’el (Honey Boy) mostly manages to do justice to her uncommonly complicated characters without sacrificing the wild plot twists or binge-inducing suspense that are among the pleasures we expect from this type of show.
Portman, an executive producer, radiates intensity (despite some distractingly inconsistent accent work) in her first major TV role, as a stymied housewife obsessed with the disappearance of a girl in her community. It’s 1966, and Maddie lives with her milquetoast husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), and entitled teenage son, Seth (Noah Jupe) in the Jewish enclave of Pikesville, just north of Baltimore. Her sudden determination to find Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle)—the daughter of a neighbor, Allan (David Corenswet), with whom she has a past—who vanished into a tropical-fish shop at the city’s Thanksgiving parade, baffles Maddie’s family. Once the star of her high school newspaper, she abruptly flees Pikesville, moves into a shabby inner-city apartment, and starts investigating. Whether she’s driven by Tessie’s plight, her own journalistic aspirations, or her murky history with Allan seems as much a mystery to Maddie as it is to us.
Cleo will soon become the next victim caught up in Mrs. Schwartz’s search for an identity. “The truth is,” she reflects, in narration addressed to Maddie, “you came at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning.” Yet Har’el and Ingram, whose layered performance captures the character’s vulnerability as well as her intelligence and grit, insist on making Cleo—a Black woman with her own family and jobs and past and dreams—more than just a vehicle for Maddie’s growth. Much of the series plays out in the month leading up to the discovery of the woman who will become known as “the lady in the lake.” A department store model by day and a bookkeeper for the local crime-boss-slash-politician Shell Gordon (Wood Harris) by night, Cleo spends what little free time she has volunteering for Myrtle Summer (Angela Robinson), an upstart challenging her corrupt employer, in an effort to make a better future for herself and her two boys. But she still needs the money that her increasingly perilous work for Gordon provides.
Despite their obvious differences, Cleo and Maddie have a lot in common. In a refreshing break from the many crime dramas that run a neon-yellow highlighter over every symbol and clue, Har’el lets these similarities come out, and viewers’ awareness of them grow, organically. Both are wives and mothers who reach a sudden breaking point and leave their husbands on that most family-oriented day, Thanksgiving. (Cleo takes her sons with her.) Each is looking to escape a narrative scripted for her by a bigoted society that thinks every working-class Black woman or bourgeois Jewish housewife is the same. They come to know some of the same people. And in a moment of believable serendipity, in the premiere, their paths cross when Maddie spots Cleo modeling a dress in the window and bustles in to buy it for herself.
It’s a typically complex scene. On the surface, we observe the entitlement of a woman who can demand to purchase an expensive-looking dress off the back of a model and the racism of the white shop assistants who warn her that the garment could be “grody” after a Black woman wore it (one of them also, upon learning that Maddie is from Pikesville, makes a point of assuring her she doesn’t look Jewish). A manager has to practically tear Cleo out of it, with no regard for her comfort, so Maddie can try it on. Yet there’s also a strange intimacy between Cleo and Maddie, their bodies zipped into the same silhouette, their skin pressed against the same fabric, just seconds apart, though they’ve yet to exchange a word. Given this setup, it’s no wonder Cleo, as narrator, understands Maddie better than the subject understands the reporter.
Har’el has a talent for imbuing seemingly insignificant moments with multifaceted meaning. Lady in the Lake doesn’t avoid the ubiquitous trauma plot, but it conjures characters—secondary figures as well as the two leads—whose personalities feel distinct from their history and circumstances. It wrestles with Maddie’s ambition and Cleo’s self-righteousness; it asks us whether their most ruthless decisions are warranted. It notices racism, sexism, antisemitism, class divisions, and particularly how they intersect, without taking us out of the past to performatively rail against them. Most of all, it liberates the characters, in the eyes of viewers if not those of the other characters, from the ill-fitting roles they’re risking so much to escape.
The show’s visual style further deepens its psychological insight. Har’el lingers on uncanny images of everyday life. Blood from the lamb Maddie picks up from the butcher drips onto her coat, and it looks like she’s been stabbed in the abdomen. We enter the parade through the perspective of a drunk man in a mailbox costume (he’s collecting letters to Santa) who has stopped to pee in an alley. Blurry boundaries separate the present, flashbacks, nightmares, and the kind of reverie you might slip into while watching a transcendent set at the club where Cleo’s friend Dora (Jennifer Mogbock) sings, in one of the show’s many sublime musical sequences. It can be hard to tell what is really happening and what exists only in one character’s mind.
Most of the time, the ambiguity works; Lady in the Lake thrives in liminal spaces. But as the season goes on, the eerie stuff threatens to crowd out the grounded mystery. Har’el starts to make connections in characters’ subconscious minds that may or may not make sense in reality. One late episode is framed by dreams of excessive length, whose relevance to Maddie’s investigation feels a bit too neat. Plot holes get covered in gauze rather than filled. This doesn’t ruin the impact of the all-important final twist, but it does muddle some details.
Ultimately, how much you enjoy the series will depend on whether you come to murder mysteries for comfort or you yearn to see the everything-in-its-right-place endings the typical whodunit supplies thoughtfully subverted. There’s nothing cozy about Lady in the Lake. But I’d take the riches it unearths from the attics of its characters’ minds over certainty any day.
