'Lady in the Lake': Natalie Portman, Moses Ingram thriller led by 'magical' showrunner
Based on the Laura Lippman's bestselling novel, showrunner, director and co-writer Alma Har'el crafted an artistic 1960s whodunit
A twisty 1960s crime drama, Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram lead the new Apple TV+ series, Lady in the Lake, adapted from the book by Laura Lippman. With all seven episodes directed by Alma Har'el (Honey Boy), the series artfully uses flashbacks and dream sequences, paired with classic whodunit elements and lush music choices, to craft a detailed and artistic story of two women whose lives unexpectedly converge in Baltimore, Maryland.
Portman plays Maddie Schwartz, a wealthy, white Jewish mother who becomes consumed by the case of a missing girl, Tessie Durst, at the local Thanksgiving parade. Getting increasingly more frustrated that people, including her husband and son, aren't more concerned about Tessie, and feeling stuck and unappreciated as a housewife, Maddie leaves her family. She moves into an apartment in a predominantly Black neighbourhood, living with the daughter of the apartment's owner, and following her passion for journalism.
Maddie doesn't have a lot of money and needs to commit insurance fraud, claiming her wedding ring was stolen, to get her hands on some cash. That's when she meets Ferdie Platt (Y'lan Noel), an aspiring detective who responds to Maddie's robbery call.
"Natalie is somebody who I've been a fan of for a while, so to be able to watch how she works and prepare with her, and decide how we're going to go about a scene, to get in the scene and to see how things are working with somebody who you respect, it only makes you better," Y'lan Noel told Yahoo Canada. "And it's really affirming that she felt the same way about me. I'll always be appreciative of that experience."
Speaking about his character, Noel highlighted that a lot of the themes we see with Ferdie navigating his position with the Baltimore police as a Black cop are still relevant today.
"He finds himself in a place where the system isn't really ready for that type of representation," he said.
"What he ends up doing, he just is uncompromising and there's going to be consequences romantically and there's consequences at work that he just sort of stares into. ... At the end of the day, he doesn't compromise his integrity."
Watch Lady in the Lake on Apple TV+ with 7 days free, then $12.99/month
We simultaneously journey down the story of Cleo Johnson (Ingram) who, at the beginning of the series, is presented as a dead woman, providing a voiceover throughout the episodes.
"They say until the lion tells its story, the hunter will always be the hero. Alive, I was Cleo Johnson. But in my death I became the lady in the lake," we hear Cleo say in a voiceover at the outset of the show. "You say you knew who took my life from me, Maddie Morgenstern. You said no one cared until you came along. Truth is, you came at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning."
Diving into to Cleo's life as a Black mother and a bartender, she ends up stepping into her employer's illegal gambling operation as a bookkeeper for nightclub owner Shell Gordon (Wood Harris). This is right as one of her sons is sick with sickle cell anemia and her husband, Slappy Johnson (Byron Bowers), isn't making a lot of money as a stand-up comic. But he is adamant that he won't compromise his material to conform to what audiences had come to expect from a Black comedian.
The role was written sepcifically for Byron Bowers, who's a longtime collaborator with Har'el. Bowers is also a talented comedian, so his kinship with the character runs deep.
"I've actually lived those things," Bowers said.
"After Montreal, my JFL, I broke during my JFL Just For Laughs New Faces, because everybody was trying to appease the industry. And I started talking about slavery. And I got kicked out a few places. So I live that also. But that's a part of finding your truth and I knew I had to do that, because the greats before me did it already."
Bowers added that the time period of Lady in the Lake is also a "pivotal moment" for the comedians that have inspired him, from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor and George Carlin.
"This is when my style of dark comedy was born," Bowers said.
"It was good to go back and then show what their lives were like actually off stage and what some of these guys were going through, and how society treated them, and how they were kicked out at every place. And we don't see that a lot, right? In a dramatic way, we don't see it. So I'm very blessed to be able to do a story like like this, as this type of comedian."
'One leg in the grave and one on a banana peel'
Something that particularly appealed to Har'el about Lady in the Lake is the concept of how the oppressed can be the oppressor. While Maddie and Cleo are both trying to be freed from society's restrictions on them, Maddie doesn't have a real understanding of Cleo's life and her reality.
"I feel like my own existence is constantly struggling with the duality of being a white, Ashkenazi Jew, who grew up really with my grandmother and my mother, as survivors of the Holocaust, with generational trauma and arrived to Israel, where I grew up, and then discovering a whole side of that existence of being an oppressor and being somebody who has not accounted for the experience of others that are so close by," Har'el shared. "It's, as an immigrant, something that I've encountered in the U.S. as well, this kind of parallel life, but I think that the goal was to humanize both experiences, and to also see the humour of it and the humanity of it."
"So many times in the past few years, I've encountered materials that were offered to me or that I've seen produced and they kind of get very caught up in this dichotomy, but from a perspective that is very judgmental of human nature. And kind of chooses sides and becomes very preachy, or kind of trying to indoctrinate you into a certain thinking, and tell you that you are either this or that, instead of connecting the dots and portraying really the human experience of all of us living in very hot water and trying to survive."
Humour is something that Har'el worked with Portman on, adding this thin line of comedy in how Maddie navigates the world.
"She's just such a marvellous dramatic actress and she obviously chooses roles that are challenging to her," Har'el said. "And this one was an opportunity to do all of that, but also not leave the comedy aspect, ... the ridiculousness, sometimes, and absurdity of this character."
"So the idea was always to totally have like one leg in the grave and one on a banana peel, and constantly push. Sometimes, in my vision, it was even more slapstick-y, but it was just really kind of pushing Maddie to be both authentic and grounded, and rooted in her own experience. But then also have an eye on how self-absorbed she is. And whenever we look at it from there, to also see the comedy of moving through the world in that way."
Watch Lady in the Lake on Apple TV+ with 7 days free, then $12.99/month
Har'el also presents some moments in Lady in the Lake in a way that really tries to put the audience inside Maddie's mind, largely through the use of dream sequences to understand her subconscious. It's an interesting element to add to the robustness of the storytelling.
"Dreams get kind of interpreted many times as things that are reinforcing something we already knew from the plot, or exploring it," Har'el said. "What I wanted to do is reveal new information and use those moments to kind of look at the shadow, if you may, of Maddie's subconscious, but also create a device that is almost like a continuation and a parallel to the whole investigative aspect of the show, but through dream."
'She knows your light, even if you don't know your light as a person'
In terms of how Har'el operates, the cast of Lady in the Lake praised how she works with actors, but also her ability to strike that fine balance between creating a detailed world, while but not being obsessed with perfection where it hinders the creativity of the project.
"She's not going to show any bad takes on you and she knows your light, even if you don't know your light as a person. She's good, she's magical with seeing people's light versus the robotic types," Bowers highlighted. "That's the type of environment you want to to go into, whether you're on screen or in real life."
"She just creates a space where you can be your best self," Noel added. "It's hard to articulate because it is a combination of play, emotional intelligence, ... compassion and empathy. ... [She's] just a dream to be able to work with as an artist, because she's one of the best."
"Alma's extremely perceptive and her aperture for authenticity is wide open. And while at the same time things were perfect, ... there wasn't an over-obsession on perfection, which is interesting, a super delicate balance to strike. ... That's an interesting space to be in, which allowed all of us to just surrender and to pay attention to what mattered most, which is what our character wanted in those individual scenes."
Lady in the Lake makes its global debut on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on July 19, followed by new episodes every Friday through August 23
