LADY IN THE LAKE: Episodes 1.1-1.2

LADY IN THE LAKE is a TV series on Apple TV+ that offers a look into 1960s Baltimore and the alleged problems that plagued the city. After the disappearance of a young Jewish girl, Natalie Portman’s character, Maddie, is thrown into a fury when her husband refuses to join the search party. This ultimately causes Maddie to walk away from her family to start a new life. Meanwhile, Moses Ingram’s character, Cloe, faces constant racism as she fights to make ends meet for her young boys.

MOVIEGUIDE® watched the first two epsidoes of LADY IN THE LAKE.

The first epsidoe opens with an unidentifiable man dumping a dead body into a lake during the night. Soon after, a young Jewish girl is seen running away from her family during a Christmas parade to look at the fish inside a pet store. This young girl, Tessie, would then go missing, leading to a citywide search undertaken by hundreds of volunteers.

With the plot of the first episode established, the show introduces the first main character, Maddie, an affluent Jewish woman facing a lot of pressure to keep up a façade of a perfect life with her husband. After spilling lamb’s blood while at the butcher on her yellow dress, Maddie visits a store to buy a new one. While at the store, she crosses paths with the show’s other main character, Cleo, who works as a store mannequin, one of her many jobs she works to make ends meet.

Maddie buys the new dress. Later, she and her family attend a community meeting that was cut short by an announcement of the young Jewish girl’s disappearance and the need for search party volunteers. Maddie and her family return home. There, Maddie grows increasingly angry that her husband, Milton, wants to act like it’s a normal day rather than join the search party. An ugly fight ensues, with Milton forbidding Maddie to help find the missing girl. So, Maddie walks out on her family.

Cloe meanwhile, is shown attending a meeting of her own, to support the first black woman voted to Congress. During the meeting, she shares her feelings that the senator is representing her struggle to fight for a better life for her two sons. After the meeting, Cloe returns home and chastises her deadbeat husband for sitting around rather than getting a job. She then races off to another one of her jobs, where she works as a barmaid at a club run by the city’s gambling and drug kingpin.

Simultaneously, Maddie finds a new apartment to live and is shown the property by the landlord’s daughter, Judith. After dropping off her belongings, Maddie and Judith begin searching for Tessie. Episode One ends with the pair finding Tessie’s dead body at the edge of a lake.

Episode Two begins with a flashback to Maddie’s past. The flashback reveals that she had a high school fling with Tessie’s father. This explains why she was so concerned about Tessie’s disappearance.

Coming back to present day, Maddie returns to her husband, Milton’s, house to grab a dress for Tessie’s funeral, which the family attends together that day. Milton tries to reconcile wuth Maddie, but he fails. Maddie returns to her new apartment and commits insurance fraud by hiding her wedding ring and staging a break-in so she can collect the $2000 insurance policy.

Cloe, meanwhile, is shown getting more and more frustrated when she’s denied a full-time position from the senator she looks up to and has for whom she’s been doing volunteer work for her re-election. After a major fit, she returns to her job as a barmaid. There, she asks the kingpin for a higher position in his operation, suggesting she gets involved in his budding business of selling marijuana.

The kingpin obliges, but tells her that he has to have major trust in those working close with him. He warns Cloe that her actions must line up with her desire to work for him. Later that night, she’s given an envelope with cash and sent to a location to drop it off.

Maddie uses the praise she gets for finding Tessie’s body to finagle a reporting job at the Baltimore Sun. She’s joined again by Judith, who blackmails Maddie into getting high in return for asking her father to delay Maddie’s rent payment. After discussing their views on the world and romanticizing about affairs in Paris, their time together is disrupted by a police officer comes to tell Maddie they’re arresting a suspect for Tessie’s murder. Maddie ends up inviting him inside and sleeps with him.

Subsequently, Cloe arrives at the unknown address and enters an apartment to deliver the money. She is locked inside by the men who receive her. After she tries to escape, they force her at gunpoint to drive them to the house of the person they’re being paid to kill. When they arrive, Cloe realizes the house they are at belongs to the senator. She is unable to stop the murder. However, in the chaos of the event, she’s able to escape her captors, and the episode ends with her running from the scene of the crime.

LADY IN THE LAKE offers an enjoyable experience for viewers looking for a historical drama. Portman and Ingram deliver convincing roles while the side characters and sets fill out the 1960s Baltimore atmosphere. The first two episodes keep viewers in suspense, but they fail to deliver significant high points to relieve this tension. Also, the story’s ebb and flow sometimes wanes, providing an unintended static storytelling instead. That said, the first two episodes set up a compelling plot for a fascinating historical drama.

LADY IN THE LAKE places extreme emphasis on doing what one feels is right rather than living by a biblical standard. This is best seen through the positive portrayal of Maddie walking out on her family, despite her husband’s efforts to reconcile. Her reason for leaving largely stands on her dissatisfaction with being a homemaker, a problem she never really expresses to her husband before her departure. The series, however, does offer some positive references to a biblical worldview from a Jewish perspective such as a telling of the creation story as well as prayer.

However, the first two episodes of LADY IN THE LAKE have excessive foul language, including 19 “f” words. Also, the frequency of foul language increases in Episode Two. Finally, the epsisodes contain some sexual immorality and infrequent but intense scenes of violence. This objectionable content in LADY IN THE LAKE, coupled with its Romantic, feminist viewpoint, make it excessive and unacceotable.

Of couse, it can be argued that the problems plaguing some of Baltimore in the 1960s are, in some ways, not as bad now as they used to be. For instance, new laws have made it illegal to discriminate against someone because of their skin color. Other problems, however, have arisen for the city, which is now run by corrupt administrators who refuse to apply proven common sense solutions to address those problems, such as school choice. The City Journal reported on Oct. 5, 2023, for example, that Baltimore City Public Schools rank as “one of the worst public school systems for academic achievement,” according to the U.S. Dept of Eductaion’s National Assessment of Education Progress.