2024-08-06 18:44:27
A drunken man disguised as a red and blue mailbox urinates on a side street in waking Baltimore. The very opening image of the series Woman in the Lake seems to be a strong response to the slightly satirical tone of the well-known musical song Good Morning Baltimore, according to which every night in this American city is a fantasy and every sound is a symphony. Thanksgiving in Baltimore in 1966 was definitely not going to be sunny.
The adaptation of the book of the same name, which can be watched in the Apple TV+ video library, has a lot on its heart. The creators were inspired by two real murders of women that took place in Baltimore in the 1960s. But they certainly don’t just examine how the police and the media approach the death of a white girl and a black woman differently. It is clear from the beginning that this noir thriller also wants to be an elegy for those still alive, especially for women.
Maddie comes from an ordinary Jewish family. Which means many things. For example, when he finally arrives home after a long day and roasts a lamb, which he then inadvertently places on the plates intended for dairy products, the husband throws the roast in the bin after a short argument. Because it’s not kosher.
Actress Natalie Portman has many reasons for portraying Maddie as a bundle of nerves. He worries all day about the missing girl next door, Tessie – it’s clear that he feels a strong emotional connection to her father and former classmate. However, the heroine’s concern and desire to search for the missing are considered by others, including her teenage son, to be sabotage of their festive dinner.
In parallel, we watch how Cleo, the mother of two children, struggles through life in a slightly more peripheral neighborhood. She tries to reconcile a complicated family situation with the fact that as a black woman in the 1960s it is difficult for her to fulfill her ambitions. Or at least earn money honestly.
Although Cleo works for the first African-American senator in the USA, this is only a volunteer activity. Otherwise, she does various things for the local gangster Gordon, and next to that, she models in the window of a department store.
Natalie Portman defies injustice as Maddie. | Photo: Apple TV+
Although the 1960s in Baltimore were full of emancipatory slogans and marijuana-loving youth, there were still plenty of ways to deprive a woman of her dignity. Whether she was white, black, or Jewish, this story shows.
Director and screenwriter Alma Har’el tries to make it clear from the beginning that Woman in the Lake is much more a social commentary than a crime or thriller. He knows how to create an atmosphere, but he is much more difficult to tell.
The series wants to be stylish, deliberately nervous and slow, like the neurotically strumming bass in the closing credits. At the same time, he becomes too intoxicated with big words addressed to the audience. “They say that until the lion tells you his story, the hunter will always be the hero,” reads the opening sentence. At other times, the narrator’s voice describes that when a woman dies, no one can deprive her of her freedom and dignity.
From the beginning, it seems that the fate of Cleo and Maddie will be complicatedly intertwined. The author observes how the two protagonists experience similar situations, often cutting through events as if they were connected to each other.
The Woman in the Lake continues the trend of crime stories with female protagonists, whose lives are touched by the missing or murdered and the investigation itself on a deeply personal level. However, unlike series such as On the Lake from 2013 or Sharp Objects from 2018 – whose director Jean-Marc Vallée also worked as a producer on Woman in the Lake before his death – it fails to combine genre narratives with social overlaps and a more intimate line regarding the female protagonists .
The first episodes of the series Woman in the Lake are in the Apple TV+ video library with Czech subtitles. | Video: Apple TV+
While the actresses Elisabeth Moss and Amy Adams immediately gained the attention of the audience in the two named projects, Natalie Portman, winner of the Oscar for Black Swan, tries too hard in her first major series role to play a woman who defies injustice, an unhappy cohabitation and the rules of the Jewish community and society in general at the time.
She can certainly evoke empathy when she angrily discovers that she cannot do almost anything without her husband’s signature, such as selling or mortgaging her own property. At the same time, however, they are rather crude illustrations of the difficulties that women had to face at that time, however much it may be necessary to remind them.
Just as in the opening episodes you cannot fully connect with the heroines, neither does the criminal plot develop in any way. Creators take their time.
It could be a sophisticated game with the rules of the genre, but for now it comes out rather empty, as the authors try to burden the narrative with many detours, fragments from the past or unexpected connections.
The role here is played by a mysterious, decades-old painting that suspiciously resembles the scene of a murder. Complicated political games are emerging regarding Baltimore’s future. But everything is outlined briefly, in short.
For the time being, Woman in the Lake seems about as thoughtful as the characters’ reflections on the essence of surrealism as a path to something miraculous. Unfortunately, the series is full of such banal statements or scenes. Although in some places it successfully evokes the atmosphere of the streets of contemporary Baltimore, it tends to lose the audience’s attention after the first episodes. Apart from the message that a lot of people had a really hard time back then, the series doesn’t deliver much else.