Mikey Madison, left, and Natalie Portman in a scene from Lady in the Lake.The Associated Press
Lady in the Lake, the new whodunnit premiering Friday on AppleTV+, should make people uncomfortable. And this response – if I do the haunting, seductive, and unfortunately bloated yarn any justice – should do the same.
The limited series, executive produced by Canadian filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée (who passed just before shooting began), deep dives into the complicated relationships between Jewish and Black communities, framing that at times confrontational conversation within a mostly gripping procedural.
An African-American woman’s body is found in a lake. A Jewish woman becomes obsessed with how she got there. Turns out, they’ve locked eyes before, posed on opposite sides of a department store window in a scene that has been widely teased in the show’s promotional material.
In the pilot episode, Natalie Portman’s Maddie Schwartz, a housewife in 1966 Baltimore, spills lamb’s blood on her yellow coat en route from the butcher to a Jewish community fundraiser. Meanwhile, Moses Ingram’s Cleo Sherwood is modelling an ivory outfit in the window display. Cleo – or specifically the outfit – catches Maddie’s eye just as the latter needs to put on something clean. So Maddie marches right on into the store, and without even having to interact with Cleo, buys the garment right off her back. This won’t be the first time Maddie appropriates from Cleo.
When authorities discover Cleo’s body months later, it’s Maddie – newly liberated from her ungrateful husband, “slumming it” in an apartment in Baltimore’s Black community, flaunting anti-miscegenation laws by having an affair with a local police officer (Y’lan Noel), and trying her hand at local journalism – who wants to tell her story. She sees her efforts as allyship, while failing to see her own entitlement.
Lady in the Lake, which is elegantly directed by Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el, is about the different ways Maddie and Cleo move through the world, and how, as Portman said in an interview with The Guardian, “oppressed people oppress others.”
The series adapts Laura Lippman’s novel, which is not to be confused with Raymond Chandler’s The Lady In The Lake. Although anyone familiar with the latter, or its 1947 movie adaptation directed by Robert Montgomery, will be quick to catch on to the ruses afoot in this series, which tells a fictional story, with surrealist strokes, while drawing from real events.
A former Baltimore Sun reporter, Lippman based her novel on two real cases. In 1969, the bodies of both 11-year-old Esther Lebowitz and 35-year-old Shirley Lee Parker were discovered. The Jewish child’s murder was heavily reported and investigated, meanwhile the African-American woman’s demise was largely ignored and remains unsolved.
Through the fictional Maddie, whose stint as a journalist begins when she discovers a child’s body, Lippman explores the disparity between the two cases and the neighbourhoods the victims come from.
The author also shifts the action to take place between 1966 and 1967, when the women’s liberation movement began organizing and the Black and Jewish alliance – as seen in the march to Selma – grew more fraught. This is when civil rights activist James Baldwin also wrote an incendiary essay in The New York Times about members of the Jewish community who describe themselves as allies but fail to recognize how they (whether landlords or department store owners) benefit just like every other group from anti-Black racism and systemic oppression.
The year 1967 is also about the time when more radical Black activism would align with the Palestinian cause, especially after the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza following the Six-Day War. That texture makes Lady in the Lake – a story where Portman’s Maddie flees her suffocating situation only to impose herself on a suffocated community – such rich and complicated viewing today. In that first episode, Maddie, wearing the dress that was just moments before filled by Cleo, steps into the fundraiser where a speaker warns about the growing “anti-Semitism” in Black power rhetoric.
Har’el balances Maddie’s story with Cleo’s, filling out the latter character in a role that’s been expanded from the novel. The show is effectively a two-hander, and yet another opportunity for the world to discover the star that Ingram is.
The series is often too insistent on spelling things out, mostly via a voiceover narration from a dead Cleo’s perspective. Portman’s precise and nuanced performance (in yet another predatory but more sympathetic role following her stunning work in May December) gives us everything we need to understand her character.
The series also fumbles in its drawn-out final episodes. They’re padded, with dream-like musical numbers reinforcing the already obvious themes and a sensational denouement resolving things that shouldn’t have been resolved, perhaps to satisfy audiences rather than the integrity of the story. It’s as if the people telling the story could only sit in the discomfort of it for so long.
Lady in the Lake premieres on AppleTV+ July 19, with new episodes each Friday.