‘Lady in the Lake’ Review: A Drifting Mystery

Portman plays Maddie Morganstern Schwartz, a Jewish housewife living in an upscale neighborhood in 1960s Baltimore, where she’s seen as a community leader. Ingram is Cleo Johnson, a working mother of two living in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, struggling to make ends meet and determined to care for her children and give them a future. Maddie is a wife, mother, and philanthropist, while Cleo is a wife, mother, bartender, department store window model, bookkeeper, and more. Maddie has everything; Cleo fights for whatever she can get. They’re very different, but they’re united by a certain sense of fighting for purpose in a world that wants them quiet and obedient.

Maddie and Cleo’s lives start to weave together in unexpected ways when a tragedy within her community drives the Jewish housewife to leave her husband (Brett Gelman) and try to pursue her first love of journalism. What Maddie doesn’t know, of course, is that the story that drove her to change her life is just one part of a wider web of secrets, crime, and death, all of which will soon envelop her in the mystery of what happened to Cleo one December night to make her into the city’s “lady in the lake.”

While the show’s trailers have set it up largely as a mystery series about Maddie looking for the truth about Cleo, and Lippman’s novel largely unfolds from Maddie’s point of view, “Lady in the Lake” begins with a slightly different approach. We see Maddie’s determination to change her life, yes, but we also see the weeks of Cleo’s life that lead up to her becoming “the lady in the lake,” from her struggles to be a good mother to her unwilling participation in Baltimore’s gambling-centric underworld. We see what she’s trying to do, what drives her, and what she really cares about, which makes her eventual fate that much more impactful. For Har’el and her writing team, it’s a chance to raise the character stakes, but it ultimately delivers somewhat mixed results.

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