Lady in the Lake Treads Shallow Waters

Photo: Apple TV+

There’s a difference between a story that’s narratively big versus thematically big. Laura Lippman’s immersively imagined and cleverly written Lady in the Lake—about a pair of murders in 1960s Baltimore, the woman who finds herself unexpectedly connected to both, and how she uses them to further her own ambitions—understood the distinction between a story that lets its characters’ lives unfurl into messy, unpleasant places and one that binds them too tightly to forces beyond their control. Apple TV+’s new adaptation, simultaneously overstuffed and oversimplified, does not. After stripping Lippmann’s story of its vivid nuance, it overloads what’s left with systemic discrimination as the primary explanation for its characters’ motivations and setbacks, then drowns in the ensuing wave of sanctimony.

Alma Har’el’s miniseries re-creates, with varying degrees of fidelity, three pivotal plot points from Lippman’s 2019 novel. Jewish housewife and mother Maddie Schwartz, after deciding to leave her husband, discovers through a mixture of intuition and coincidence the body of an 11-year-old girl named Tessie, whose disappearance was heavily covered by the city’s leading newspapers. That experience renews Maddie’s adolescent writing dreams and inspires her to get a job at the Star, where she’s sabotaged by her mostly male co-workers. While working on the newspaper’s helpline column, she helps discover another corpse, that of a missing Black woman named Cleo Johnson, whose heavily decomposed body is found in a city lake. Maddie wants to find out what happened to Cleo, and whenever a man tells her she should stop—like her editors, who don’t care about covering the death, or the Black police officer she’s secretly sleeping with, who worries people will wonder where Maddie keeps getting her intel—it only makes her work so much harder.

It’s unrealistic, and ignorant of the differences between media, to expect the adaptation to faithfully re-create every aspect of Lippman’s book, like its shifting perspectives from a third-person account of Maddie’s life and first-person chronicles by Cleo’s ghost and Maddie’s friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. The TV version of Lady in the Lake is so altered, though, that it loses core elements of its source material, from the novel’s interest in tracking its female characters’ discordant, vying relationships with each other and their complex negotiations of when to deflect or encourage male attention for their own benefit, to its depiction of Baltimore as a city of neighborhoods with generations of interwoven, fraught history. (Lippman’s detective novels are often set in Baltimore, where she still lives after working for years as a reporter at the Baltimore Sun.) Even the novel’s steady-eyed consideration of journalism as a necessary but inherently opportunistic field is blunted by the series’ ending beat.

Instead, Har’el, who has writing credits on three episodes and directed all seven, makes the story constrictive in its many coincidences and replaces the mystery with a sermon. This Lady in the Lake is so consumed with injustice that it loses all sense of intimacy and, in the process, limits the potential of Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram’s central performances. Cleo in particular has been almost entirely rewritten from a high-spirited sex worker who leaves her two sons with her parents as she pursues a new relationship into a weary woman struggling to make her marriage work and fighting against her community’s reliance on drugs and gambling. Ingram digs into the character’s rearranged priorities with a mixture of no-nonsense brusqueness and gentle affection, but the drastic diminishment in Cleo’s ghostly narration from the novel tempers her resentment of Maddie for digging into her death for content and dulls a major source of the book’s suspense. Portman’s melancholy and mercurial affect gestures to her exceptional turn in Jackie and contrasts quite well with her own depiction of a younger, more innocent and impressionable version of Maddie. Her performance becomes rote, though, as it relies on increasingly hysterical bursts of feeling that don’t quite connect with Maddie’s internal life. (Portman’s spotty attempt at Baltimore’s accent is a distraction, too.)

Lady in the Lake’s flattened characterizations extend to its depiction of the uneasy dynamic between the city’s Jewish and Black residents. The series hammers home the bigotry faced by both groups, with numerous white women paying Maddie what they consider a compliment by telling her she doesn’t look Jewish, and a subplot involving a white-supremacist rally in the city. But where Lippman’s novel conveyed how the city’s disparate ethnic groups could themselves be sectarian and insular, how the Jewish and Black communities each held their own assumptions and stereotypes about the other, the series is more muted in its application of that intergroup tension. An anecdote in the novel about Maddie’s husband discriminating against Cleo in their childhood is removed, while a scene in which he praises Black people to Maddie as “brave� for standing up to the racist demonstrators is added. Meanwhile, the Black crime lord Shell Gordon, who in the novel has only one cop and one aspiring politician in his pocket, becomes a baddie with major pull and some critical things to say about Jewish business owners. (The electric Wood Harris, playing another Baltimore gangster after his work as Avon Barksdale on The Wire, carries this entire story line on his shoulders.) And while there are more Black characters than in the source material, they’re mostly background figures either playing a version of a daily-numbers racket that relies on pseudoscientific interpretations of their dreams or gangsters involved in running the obviously rigged scam. To make its new version of Cleo a crusader, the series has to make the Black community around her incredibly susceptible to superstition and immorality, and that’s a crummy bargain.

Lady in the Lake is Har’el’s lengthiest and most involved effort to date, but that additional space isn’t to her benefit. Episodes lack distinct beginning and endpoints to demarcate how characters change from one installment to another, so each hour feels frenetic as it pinballs among subplots while the overall series-long pace is plodding. The story doesn’t advance forward so much as it lurches, meandering through a series of style-over-substance narrative deviations chosen seemingly only for their ability to add visual surrealness. The series begins with a Thanksgiving parade, giving Har’el the excuse to film a dizzying cacophony of monstrous puppets lunging at the camera. A few paragraphs in the novel about the suspected killer’s time in a controversial military program are stretched into a crude Manchurian Candidate facsimile that amounts to little more than a salacious depiction of an unraveling mind. And throughout the series, Har’el puts viewers inside a few of Maddie and Cleo’s actual dreams, with the women clutching lambs, wandering under lines of hanging laundry and through floods of aquarium water, and, in a particular cringey scene, dancing in a choreographed routine to a jazzy cover of “Go Down Moses.�

This sporadic uncanniness admittedly provides a welcome break from the series’ monotonous interiors, obviously artificial depiction of Baltimore’s nightlife, and the requisite shot of the Domino Sugar sign. But more so it accentuates how thinly Maddie and Cleo are drawn, how reduced they are to femme-coded imagery. A trippy montage of Maddie vacuuming, dusting, and lying under her husband is meant to convey her dissatisfaction with married life and its imbalanced domestic labor, but what the series can’t consistently convey is Maddie’s inner voice, which Lippman wrote with such sly starkness: her realizations of her own political contradictions, her awareness of when to tell a man to call her Mrs. versus Ms., her free-floating, amorphous hunger for more. All these little details about how people think about their lives are consumed by the series’s larger insistence that our actions and decisions are the direct result of inequality. That observation is correct on the-personal-is-political level, but simply repeating the point makes for very repetitive storytelling if the personal and political aren’t rendered with equal care and specificity.

Lady in the Lake’s greatest mistake is believing that Maddie and Cleo’s lives, dreams, and desires are only of value if they’re victims of something. Cleo turns against Shell to avenge her family and friends and to stand up for all disenfranchised Black women in the city. Maddie maintains a veneer of strength, even as her uniformly sexist and racist colleagues smack her on the ass, expect her to bring them bagels, and casually use slurs around her. Even little Tessie’s edges from the novel are sanded off, denying her a purpose outside of narrative utility. She exists only to die, not to want, a concept that Lady in the Lake wants to criticize through its simplistic “To be a woman is to suffer� framing. But that martyrdom requires the series to turn its back on the textured characterizations of Lippman’s novel—on their selfishness, on their competition with other women, and on the suggestion that they can achieve satisfactorily happy endings by putting their own cravings first. By sapping the novel of its provocatively murky tension between what women crave for themselves and what they’ll do to get it, Lady in the Lake fails to recognize that it’s part of the problem.