Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake makes you second guess your own past and your wary future. It’s an elegant mystery that twists on itself as it delves into the darkest chapters of our country’s history when it comes to race, ingrained privilege and misogyny. Heralded writer and director Alma Har’el re-creates 1960s Baltimore with dangerous panache as two women fight to keep their heads above water.
When you adapt a popular novel, you have eyes on you just to make sure you go deep enough into the details. For Har’el, she wanted to capture the flawed struggle about a woman who has been underestimated in her marriage and by society as a whole. In other ways, she wanted to expand the character of Cleo Jackson to make the narrative between Portman’s Maddie and her more balanced.
“When I read the novel for the first time, I marked these moments that felt like they had truth to them that I hadn’t really heard before,” Har’el explains. “They were truthful to this Jewish woman who was white, and I felt, as an immigrant and someone who wasn’t aware of my whiteness in the same way that I am now, that they had a specific tone to them that I appreciated because they weren’t apologetic. They were kind of infuriating in some way, and they were almost funny to me sometimes in their lack of awareness. At the same time, I like Maddie–love her even–even though she’s kind of crazy to me.
I really tried to capture and walk that line of one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel. What I thought was missing, though, was knowing more about the character that Moses Ingram played, Cleo Jackson, and that became a challenge of our production. Laura Lippman did an incredible job in the book, and I wanted to uplift the whole Black side of the story, so we can get a sense of really who Cleo is and what life was like at the time for her.”
There is a moment towards the end of the season where Natalie Portman’s Maddie Schwartz had the audacity to ask Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) if there is any world where they could be friends. It’s an audacious assumption brought on by Maddie’s whiteness and privilege, and it makes the viewer cringe when he asks it. Har’el and I discussed how we didn’t like watching characters who considered themselves saints. Stepping into the mess makes for better writing and stronger characters.
“I feel like I am drawn to characters who aren’t purely inspiring,” she admits. “It’s just less interesting to me, and it’s not the kind of people that I have in my life. I grew up with problematic people that were both wonderful and inspiring, but, at the same time, they were maybe only stable in one way. I’m less interested in people that their whole life is a manifestation of a politically astute existence. Moses, on the other hand, plays sombody who makes questionable decisions in her life that is connected with her childhood and her father. She’s somebody who, I think, was a lot more inspiring to some people. That’s the challenge of our show. A lot of people came to our show not expecting to see Natalie doing a character that is sometimes hard to agree with or watch. That made it fun for me.”
The color blue is prominent all throughout this limited series. It appears in Maddie’s kitchen early in the series as it also recalls the Jewish faith and the visual cue of water. Cleo’s jacket, with it’s dramatic collar, is one of the best costume pieces of any show this season. It’s a shade that you cannot escape as these women ebb and flow towards one another, like water lapping at the shore.
“There was a specific poweder blue color that I was chasing for with that jacket,” Har’el says. “My costume designer, Shiona Turini, should be awarded for her patience, because she did probably 25 color tests. We would just paint the fabrics again and again and again until we got the right color. We were looking at a lot of photos that were the first photos on film that were taken from the fifties and sixties, and there was a certain quality to the blue at the time. That blue fel like it was of the time or what’s left of the memories of that time. Those of us who look at photography, anyway. It had a loneliness to it but also innocence. It was, obviously, inspired by the water motif since the show is about a body in a lake and water in genereal is kind of consciousness and subconsciousness. What’s on top, what’s below, and all of those things.”
Lady in the Lake is streaming now on Apple TV+.
