Natalie Portman’s ‘Lady in the Lake’ Is a Soggy, Pretentious Failure

Boldness is often a storytelling virtue… except when it’s not, as is the case with Lady in the Lake.

An adaptation of Laura Lippman’s 2020 bestseller of the same name (whose title is borrowed from Raymond Chandler’s 1943 classic), director Alma Har’el’s seven-part Apple TV+ period-piece murder mystery, premiering July 19, indulges in non-stop fanciful embellishments, symbolism, dream sequences, and cross-cutting. All of this quickly grates on the nerves (and senses) and, worse still, fails to distract attention away from the plot’s convoluted busyness and nonsensicality. Led by a Natalie Portman performance that’s as exaggerated as the rest of the florid action, it bites off so much more than it can chew that it’s no surprise when it chokes during its finale.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

At Baltimore’s 1966 Thanksgiving Day parade, Jewish girl Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle) visits a fish shop and, after speaking with the white clerk and a Black patron with a bruised eye, promptly vanishes. Her disappearance becomes front-page city news, and it especially rattles Maddie Schwartz (Portman), an observant Jewish housewife whose dress is ruined after a visit to the butcher to buy lamb for dinner with her husband Milton (Brett Gelman) and son Seth (Noah Jupe).

Maddie races to a department store, where she purchases the yellow dress being worn in the window by model Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram), thereby linking the two for the first of many times throughout Lady in the Lake, whose prologue—in which the body of a blue-coated woman is dumped in a fountain at night—features narration from Cleo in which she says that no one cared about her death until Maddie came along and made it the beginning of her own story.

Thus Har’el establishes that Cleo is the title’s deceased woman, although things aren’t simple in Lady in the Lake, to the point of exasperation. Frustrated with her chauvinistic husband and cartoonishly cruel child, Maddie decides that she’s had enough of subservient domesticity and bails on her clan.

This rash move is followed by a series of subsequent decisions that are extraordinarily impulsive, beginning with Maddie moving into an all-Black neighborhood with the aid of Judith Weinstein (Mikey Madison), the lesbian daughter of a family friend who has eyes for Maddie and convinces her to smoke pot. Maddie throws caution to the wind like she’s blowing her nose, and it’s not long before she’s shacking up with Black police officer Ferdie Platt (Y'lan Noel)—an interracial romance that’s illegal in Maryland—and pursuing the career in journalism that she’s dreamed about since high school, but put on the back burner in order to conform to misogynistic cultural expectations.

Expressionistic flashbacks hint at Maddie’s dark past with Tessie’s father Allan (David Corenswet) and his dad, yet there’s little reason to get hung up on those, since they turn out to have little overt bearing on the proceedings. Instead, they’re merely footnotes designed to gussy up the antisemitism and racism-infused action and, additionally, to underline the show’s overarching theme about the high cost of freedom.

This is further relayed by Lady in the Lake’s concurrent narrative about Cleo, who at the time of Tessie’s disappearance is dealing with her own crisis. Cleo works at a nightclub owned by crime boss Shell Gordon (Seth Davis), tending bar and keeping the books for the local numbers game that years earlier caused her father to cut and run, and which now seems likely to ensnare her son Teddy (Tyrik Johnson). Cleo has another boy who’s fatally ill with sickle cell anemia as well as a husband, wannabe stand-up comedian Slappy (Byron Bowers), who’s a deadbeat. Even her best friend, lounge singer Dora Carter (Jennifer Mogbock), is a strung-out mess.

Cleo has it rough, and her efforts to keep herself alive—and, later, to escape her thorny circumstances—are wrapped up in the investigation into Tessie, whose dead body Maddie finds in one of innumerable slapdash twists. The police initially pin Tessie’s slaying on creepy Polish fish store employee Stephan Zawadzkie (Dylan Arnold). Intent on finding out what’s really going on, Maddie uses a fetching photo of herself to entice Stephan into a pen-pal relationship that’s as preposterous as it is dangerous. Their dynamic results in perilous situations that eventually dovetail with the death of Cleo, who couldn’t quite extricate herself from a no-win situation created by Shell’s right-hand man Reggie Robison (Josiah Cross), who had her drive the getaway car in a crime involving the Civil Rights politician in whom she once believed.

Lady in the Lake is even more unnecessarily intricate than it sounds, and it exacerbates this problem with a preponderance of superfluous, motif-heavy flashbacks and fantasy sequences (set to jazzy horns and piano) that complicate without providing clarity. Director Har’el doesn’t let a scene breathe on its own. In her defense, however, her tale would be severely thin if it were told without these formal bells and whistles.

Portman is similarly unsubtle, playing every moment with such gusto that Maddie comes off as unconvincingly rash, hysterical, and ambitious, not to mention magically able to land on her feet and achieve her ends. With a thick Baltimore accent and, at least early on, a pillbox hat perched atop her head, she appears to be doing a variation on her celebrated Jackie turn, albeit with far inferior material.

The charismatic Ingram is likewise handcuffed by the excessiveness and implausibility of Lady in the Lake, whose attempts to parallel the plights of 1960s Jews, Blacks, and women proves contrived. Maddie and Cleo are kindred spirits insofar as their paths keep crossing and they suffer for striving to attain the types of lives they believe they deserve, but Har’el’s series is ultimately more captivated by its own showmanship than its protagonists’ ordeals.

That becomes painfully evident during its seventh installment, when a collection of bombshells strain credulity by wrapping things up in a neat and tidy bow. Regardless of its solemn tone, sad faces, and compromised resolutions, its conclusion reveals the entire affair to be merely a high-gloss fairy tale playing dress up as a socially conscious noir.