Alma Har’el’s seven-part Baltimore mystery looks better than almost anything on television and cannot leave a scene alone. Moses Ingram is the reason to keep going; the dream sequences, the voiceover and the constant underlining are the reasons you may not.
Alma Har’el created, wrote and directed all seven episodes of Lady in the Lake, and shares the editing credit with Yael Hersonski and Dominic LaPerriere, so everything on screen is how she wanted it. What she wanted is a Baltimore of 1966 in which two women who barely meet are joined by a murder: Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), a Jewish housewife who leaves her marriage to chase a story, and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), who is dead before the first episode has finished telling us her name. It is adapted from Laura Lippman’s novel, and it is about who gets to tell whose story. It says so, more than once, and that is the trouble with it. First the good news, which is considerable.
Ingram is the good news. Cleo keeps the books for Shell Gordon (Wood Harris), who runs the numbers from the back of a club, and by day she stands in a department-store window modelling dresses for white women who look straight through her. Ingram plays that stillness as effort; you can see her holding her face. We were held by her from the first window scene, and the reason is simple: the show keeps posing her as a symbol and she keeps insisting on being a person, with sore feet and two boys to feed. Shiona Turini’s costumes do a good deal of the work, the borrowed finery in the window against the plain wool coat Cleo actually owns.
Lachlan Milne shoots it all in deep, warm colour: the club in red and gold, the Schwartz kitchen the yellow of a period advertisement, the streets in a blue winter light. JC Molina’s Baltimore is dense and particular, pressed-tin ceilings, pawnshop windows, a newsroom that seems to smell of ash. Marcus Norris scores it in low jazz and then, when Har’el wants a dream, swells into something closer to a musical. The title sequence is the best-made minute in the series, and it plays seven times.
Portman is harder to settle on. She has a Baltimore accent that comes and goes and a character the writing cannot decide whether to admire or prosecute. Maddie leaves Milton (Brett Gelman) and their son Seth (Noah Jupe), talks her way into the paper past Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince), and takes a lover, Ferdie (Y’lan Noel), a Black policeman she is careful not to be seen with. Portman plays it with a brittle brightness that works in the newsroom and less well at home, where she is asked to be the heroine and the cautionary example inside the same scene. She is also, on purpose, standing in front of the woman we want to watch.
The dream sequences are where it comes apart. Har’el has Maddie imagine herself into shop windows, into a dance number, into her own past, with Cleo narrating from beyond the grave, and the first two or three are startling. By the fifth episode we sighed when the colour shifted and the music swelled, because the story was about to stop and explain something it had already shown us. The editors cut between the two women’s kitchens with care, one answering the other, and then the voiceover arrives to tell us the homes are connected. The mystery itself, a missing girl, a body in the water, goes slack while the show attends to its meanings.
Har’el’s Honey Boy was a small film about a boy and his damaged father, and it knew how many ideas it could carry. This is a far bigger canvas and she has filled every inch of it. Harris, as Shell, gives the one performance that seems to have been left alone: quiet, amused, a man who has never needed to raise his voice, and every scene he is in feels like a different and better show about the same city. Against other period crime dramas it has more style than most and less patience with its plot than any.
The reviews so far split almost down the middle, and we understand both halves. If Ingram in that window is enough for you, and it may well be, there are seven hours here that never look less than considered. If you want a mystery that pulls, watch the first two episodes and decide whether you can take five more of being told what you have just seen.
