Natalie Portman in Uneven Apple TV+ Mystery

Recent Apple TV+ period dramas have a running “Whose story is this?” problem — an awareness of the dangers of monochromatic approaches to history, without a clear sense of how to fix the issue.

Masters of the Air, for example, turned the Tuskegee Airmen into a one-episode footnote in a series about the 100th Bomb Group, doing no service to either narrative. Lessons in Chemistry‘s efforts to create a civil rights-adjacent supporting arc that wasn’t in the source material fared a bit better — Aja Naomi King even received an Emmy nomination — but definitely didn’t feel organic. The Big Cigar never figured out whether it wanted to be a show about Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party or some helpful white Hollywood producers; instead, it served neither story particularly well.

Subtext becomes text in Apple TV+’s new seven-part limited series Lady in the Lake, adapted by Alma Har’el (Honey Boy) from the novel by Laura Lippman. It’s an entire series about a woman whose initially noble attempt to reclaim her personal narrative becomes something solipsistic when she fails to recognize that she’s steamrolling, or just ignoring, the narratives of people around her. 

Har’el, who directed every episode and wrote or co-wrote much of the series, has crafted an ambitious portrait of the unexpected pitfalls of self-actualization, fleshing out some of the more difficult undertones of Lippman’s book in provocative ways. There’s so much complicated stuff happening, or at least being attempted, in Lady in the Lake that I feel petty in mentioning that what Har’el doesn’t succeed at is what feels ostensibly simpler: In concentrating on the conundrum of whose story the series is, Lady in the Lake loses track of what the story is. Most of the forward momentum from the book has been lost in this translation, which I think is quite interesting and worthy of consideration but rarely convincingly entertaining.

The story starts in 1966 Baltimore. Natalie Portman plays Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife who, seemingly out of nowhere, upends her life and moves out of her comfortable suburban home and away from her husband (Brett Gelman‘s Milton) and son (Noah Jupe’s Seth). We know Maddie is unfulfilled because television has led us to believe that a woman married to a character played by Brett Gelman (poor Brett Gelman) is rarely satisfied. But everybody within the story is flummoxed, especially when Maddie moves into a dingy apartment on the Black side of Baltimore.

Maddie, who leaves with no source of income and no sense of what she wants to do with her new life, soon fixates on the case of a missing Jewish girl. When she and a friend (Mikey Madison’s Judith) find the girl’s body, Maddie parlays this into an opportunity to write for the Baltimore Star, since journalism was apparently an aspiration thwarted by a horrible situation from her past.

And when the body of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) is discovered in a fountain, Maddie makes it her mission to crack the case, much to the chagrin of her editors (who don’t care about Black lives), the Black cop she’s seeing on the sly (Y’lan Noel’s Ferdie Platt) and Cleo herself, narrating sarcastically from beyond the grave.

I’m able to break it down that cleanly because it’s the plot of Lippman’s book, which illustrates Maddie’s myopia by alternating chapters between Maddie’s perspective and the perspectives of individuals she interacts with in different circumstances — people whose personal stories she’s unable to imagine or comprehend on her own. Maddie isn’t the villain of Lady in the Lake, but she’s convinced she’s its hero and she’s not.

Although Cleo narrates a chunk of the book as well, it’s mostly in the context of irritation at having her story appropriated by somebody whose empathy is inherently suspicious. Har’el has reconfigured that structure to give Cleo a more significant role — maybe not 50-50 equality with Portman, but close. 

In many ways, it’s a good choice, because Ingram is fierce and compelling. Expanding Cleo’s presence gives us more time with Baltimore numbers runner, club owner and political fixer Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), his shady right-hand Reggie (Josiah Cross, previously seen in the aforementioned Tuskegee Airmen episode of Masters of the Air) and Cleo’s estranged, anachronistically edgy stand-up comic hubby (Byron Bowers’ Slappy). The storyline that unites them could be better and, at times, it causes the series as a whole to stagnate, but I appreciate the choice.

It lets Har’el dig deeper into the similarities and differences between these two women and, in doing so, more fully explore the varying stigmas associated with being Black and Jewish in 1960s Maryland, layers of powerlessness and voicelessness compounded by being a woman. 

Maddie can pass; a running joke in the early episodes is that she doesn’t look Jewish. Cleo cannot pass, but she can become invisible — figuratively — which is more of a deadly drawback than a superpower. Who gets to pass? Who gets to assimilate? And what do you leave behind when you do? How long do you hold the trauma of your powerlessness — especially in the case of Maddie and her family, when a genocide is only one generation in your past? 

This is tough stuff, and Har’el works her way through it in ways that are off-putting and, in their best moments, inspired. Lady in the Lake is infused with a dream logic, which reflects how disconnected both Maddie and Cleo are from the concrete worlds around them. They’re haunted by nightmares and haunted by their pasts. The lines between memory and surrealism keep blurring, building to a late-season episode that’s almost a hallucinatory modern dance piece — music by Marcus Norris, a soundtrack packed with standards by Peggy Lee, Shirley Bassey and Nina Simone — with shades of both the fragmented quality of Honey Boy and the swirling disorientation of Har’el’s documentary Bombay Beach. It’s all grounded in a handsomely mounted depiction of ’60s Baltimore, full of impeccable costumes and production design choices. 

I wasn’t always sure that what Har’el was attempting was effective, but the series is audacious in a way so few shows attempt to be. As the story links racism and antisemitism, images from slavery and references to the Holocaust, Lady in the Lake is an easy series to be impressed by. But somewhere along the way, it’s the story, whoever’s story it happens to actually be, that gets lost. 

Unlike the hero in Lessons in Chemistry, a much less nuanced version of a very similar plot, Maddie isn’t supposed to just walk into a newsroom and be a natural simply by virtue of speaking truth. But there’s a difference between treating her dream as the unconvincing thing that it is and treating it like an afterthought in the plot. (See also Maddie’s relationship with Platt, another thing that isn’t necessarily supposed to be convincing, but could at least be committedly unconvincing.)

Portman spent much of her youth playing projections of femininity rather than characters — think Beautiful Girls, The Professional, Garden State, Closer — usually for male writers and directors. Her work has become more interesting as she’s been able to play layered characters who are trapped in similarly artificial conceits — the balletic obsession of Black Swan, the fragile fame of Jackie, the actorly posturing of May December.

Here, she’s playing the role of a woman who’s been playing a role for decades and, finally choosing to be “herself,” doesn’t know who or what that even means. Just as her journalistic career can’t be instantly credible, Maddie can’t be instantly credible. So is it supposed to be immersive when Portman plays the 17-year-old version of herself? No. It’s the person she’s trying to be, stuck in the person she was. Is her Baltimore accent — sure to prompt a lot of “Are Baltimore and Philadelphia accents the same?” Googling — supposed to be jarring in a show in which very few other actors are doing the accent? Yes, because even where Maddie belongs, she doesn’t fully belong.

Portman and Maddie are ill-at-ease, and that stands out — intentionally, I would say — against the more naturalistic performances from the rest of the ensemble, including the likably flighty Madison, the almost-too-enigmatic Cross, the effortlessly slick Harris and the thoroughly unnerving Dylan Arnold as a pet store employee who becomes a suspect in both murders.

Portman doesn’t reconcile the inconsistencies and prickly sides of the character, but she embraces and embodies them on that intellectual level on which the show plays best. I wish the disparate pieces in Lady in the Lake came together a bit better, that it worked as an essay and a tone poem and a thriller on equal terms. But I still found its aspirations, unevenly fulfilled, to be admirable.