If you’ve read Laura Lippman’s novel “Lady in the Lake,” about a pair of murders in Baltimore in the 1960s, you will know right away that the Apple TV+ mini-series based on it has taken liberties. The Thanksgiving parade that opens the action is not in the book; neither is the man dressed as a mailbox whom we see relieving himself in an alley before resuming his place in the procession.
It is a small moment characteristic of the writer and director Alma Har’el’s exhaustive reworking of Lippman’s twisty but fairly straightforward 2019 mystery. It is visually striking and nimbly staged: the powder blue and rusty red shades of the mailbox costume set against the dingy alley, the camera following the dancer in his bulky carapace as he awkwardly capers back to the parade. It’s diversely suggestive: of the distant period (mail!), of the bleak season, of a still strong civic self-regard. And it’s just there — cool and quirky, with no real weight, gone when the figure rounds the corner into the street.
The prodigiously talented Har’el has worked extensively in commercials and music videos and made several documentaries, including the evocative “Bombay Beach,” filmed at the Salton Sea. Before “Lady in the Lake,” her only major fictional work was the terrific feature “Honey Boy,” written by and starring her sometime collaborator Shia LaBeouf. Based on LaBeouf’s life, it explored the porous boundaries between fantasy and real life, between performance and ordinary behavior.
“Lady in the Lake,” which premiered with two of its seven episodes on Friday, has some similar ideas. But working as creator, director and primary writer, Har’el doesn’t manage to pull them together. The show is visually striking and full of sensuous atmosphere. But the ideas it is trying to put across about the wages of race, class and gender in a particular place and time don’t really translate from script to screen, and Har’el’s baroque elaborations on Lippman’s solid mystery plot start to feel increasingly artificial, in a tinselly, uninteresting way.
Lippman’s novel (the recipient of a rave review in The New York Times by Stephen King) tied together two fictional cases inspired by real events, the murders of a Jewish girl and a Black woman. Her main character is a Jewish housewife and frustrated writer in Baltimore, Maddie Schwartz (nee Morgenstern), who exploits the deaths to embark on a new career as a newspaper reporter; Maddie’s reinvention also involves leaving her husband and son and having an affair with a Black cop.
Har’el conflates some significant characters and adds and subtracts others while adhering, until the later episodes, to the major points of the plot. But she is less interested in that plot than in the themes of storytelling — who gets to tell the stories of Tessie, the Jewish girl, and Cleo, the Black woman — and broken dreams. Cleo’s dream of being a singer has gone unrealized, but Maddie’s dream of being a writer will be gained on the back of Cleo’s death.
And for all of Har’el’s technique and imagination, her approach is awfully literal: People in “Lady in the Lake” do a lot of dreaming. The dreams are heavily freighted with symbols, from lambs to blood to water. They are trickily edited, so that dreaming and non-dreaming can be hard to distinguish (thematically apt, but mainly just frustrating). Scenes of all sorts are constructed in a style of quick-cut montage that blurs together the real and the figurative.
The expressionistic tenor of the show is emphasized by its focus on performance, which is again executed in a literal way: People are continually performing, in fantasy sequences or in the actual story. A major supporting character, Cleo’s friend Dora, is a singer at the nightclub where Cleo works as a bartender and bookkeeper. Cleo’s husband, Slap, is a broken-down but talented stand-up comedian. Memories and visions turn into elaborate production numbers.
Some of this material is pretty good. As Slap, the comedian Byron Bowers does a routine that is a brief high point. And a rendition by Dora of Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman,” acted by Jennifer Mogbock and sung by Toni Scruggs, is compelling. But such moments are isolated pleasures. And the studied, curatorial feel of the soundtrack — Barbra Streisand’s “Gotta Move” as Maddie moves out, Sonny and Cher’s “Little Man” when the police chase a suspect into a burlesque house, Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is” over a scene of a woman bleeding out on a kitchen floor — serves only to distance us further from the characters and the emotions they are purportedly experiencing.
Not mentioning the actors portraying those characters until now is a bit of a disservice, but Har’el, who was so good with the cast in “Honey Boy,” doesn’t give her cast in “Lady in the Lake” much room to breathe.
Natalie Portman, never the most relaxed of performers, is pinched and competent as Maddie; the idea of her twin battles against the Jewish and journalistic patriarchies is clear, but we don’t feel its force in Portman’s portrayal. Moses Ingram is good as Cleo, who is a more interesting, fleshed-out character. In the smaller role of Maddie’s angry son, Seth, Noah Jupe — who played the fictional version of LaBeouf as a child in “Honey Boy” — gives an energetic, spiky performance with some welcome hints of humor.
The social-historical forces at work in the story — the racism, antisemitism and gender discrimination faced by Maddie, Cleo and many of the other characters — receive from Har’el a treatment similar to that of the novel’s other themes: They are pumped up, with appearances by neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan and references to concentration camps that were not in the book. Throughout, Har’el does not succeed in reconciling her noirish period mystery with her elaborate, musical-style social-justice fable. Her “Lady in the Lake” is a shiny, attractive bauble, but its artificiality wears you down.
Read More: ‘Lady in the Lake’ Review: Not Just Another Baltimore Mystery
