Lady in the Lake

Apple TV  | ★★✩✩✩

Reviewed by Stephen Pollard

​

There must be a word – probably German – for something that is at once portentous, heavy and self-important and yet also trivial, silly and very, very dull. Maybe we should just translate the title of Apple TV’s adaptation of Laura Lippman’s bestseller Lady in the Lake into German: Dame im See. There you go, I’ve coined a new phrase.

There has been a huge amount of publicity around this seven-part series, not least because it’s Natalie Portman’s first TV role. And yes, she is very good in it. And for the JC, that’s almost the least of the Jew-action. First, it’s written and directed by Alma Har’el, an Israeli music video director, whose first film, Honey Boy, was well received by critics. But the Jew-interest has barely begun, because half the story is about Portman’s character, Maddie Schwartz, who is married to a lawyer in 1960s Baltimore but decides she is trapped, so she leaves him – and her son – and moves to a flat in a black neighbourhood. The first two episodes revolve around the disappearance and – plot spoiler – murder of a young Jewish girl, whose body Maddie discovers. There are lots of Jewish characters, lots of Jewy things and a plot about Jews.

It’s all well done – no complaints or the usual caricatures there (it would have been a pretty spectacular fail if there had been, given the creatives involved).

But there is a spectacular fail of another kind. Apple has shown only the first three of the seven parts, and as of now the real plot hasn’t actually started. I know this because I was bored senseless watching the beautifully crafted, beautifully shot, beautifully acted and oh-so-very-dull episodes and I cheated. The thought that kept going through my mind was that there surely had to be more to it than this, so I Googled the book and found out the main plot.

The episodes so far interweave two main characters’ stories: Maddy Schartz and black single mother Cleo Johnson, a hard-working department store model and bartender who wants to go into politics but ends up – another plot spoiler – driving men hired by a gangster to kill the black state senator Cleo wants to work for.

Natalie Portman as Maddie Schwartz and and Moses Ingram as Cleo Johnson

By the close of episode three we don’t yet know what brings these two women’s stories together. Google told me – biggest plot spoiler of the lot – that Cleo is killed, and Maddie, who we have already seen trying to turn her involvement in finding the Jewish girl into a story for the local newspaper, ends up not just finding Cleo’s body in – you guessed it! – the lake but also finding herself as she becomes an actual journalist.

Now what could be more designed to appeal to the editor-at- large of the JC than a series about a Jewish journalist (especially when played by Natalie Portman)? Well, at the most basic level, we really shouldn’t have to wait until episode four for any of the main plot to kick in. But there is a deeper problem. There are plenty of dramas where character is really the only driving force – Mad Men, for example, to cite another 1960s period piece – and that can be just fine if you either care about the characters or care about what’s being laid out in front of you on the screen. I didn’t care about any of Lady in the Lake. I bothered to find out the plot only because I thought there surely had to be more to it than the impressionistic haze of drama of the first episodes. I had to watch them to be able to write this. Now this is written, I am going to leave the rest of Lady in the Lake unwatched.