Natalie Portman lights up 'Lady in the Lake'

“They say until the lion tells his story, the hunter will always be the hero,” is the striking opening line of Lady in the Lake, a new series starring (and produced by) Natalie Portman and directed and written by another Israeli who has made good in Hollywood, Alma Har’el.

The series, available on Apple TV+ starting today, balances dazzling scenes, fascinating characters, and genuine suspense with clunky messaging. It tells parallel stories of Baltimore in the mid-1960s, focusing on two women who each want more out of life and whose lives cross unexpectedly.

One woman is a Jewish housewife, Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), and the other is a young Black mother, Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), scrambling to support her children and trying to change the system politically. It’s based on a novel by Laura Lippman (who happens to be married to David Simon, creator of The Wire), and focuses on painting equally rich portraits of Black and Jewish Baltimore of that era. 

We learn in the first two minutes that Cleo is dead, her body dumped in a lake. The scene shifts to about a month earlier, on Thanksgiving Day 1966, when Maddie, feeling harassed, tries to prepare a holiday feast, knowing that her husband, Milton (Brett Gelman of Stranger Things, who recently visited Israel and performed on Eretz Nehederet), will likely invite guests without letting her know. 

Cleo, who works as a department-store model, also keeps the books for a shady gangster operation, while her husband tries and fails to support the family as a stand-up comedian. Both women are involved in community events, with Cleo making an impromptu speech at an event hosted by the first female Black state senator in Maryland, which raises some eyebrows among her crime-linked employers, among them Shell (Wood Harris, best known as Avon Barksdale on The Wire). 

Meanwhile, Milton has invited over a prominent television reporter, Wallace White (Charlie Hofheimer, who portrayed Abe, Peggy’s Jewish radical boyfriend, on Mad Men). But the dinner doesn’t go well, mainly because Maddie is distracted by the disappearance of a Jewish child, Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle). 

Tessie is a sensitive child who clutches a book about marine life at the Thanksgiving Day parade and wanders into a fish store, hoping to find a seahorse, only to vanish. Tessie’s father, Allen (David Corenswet who appeared in We Own This City), was Maddie’s prom date in high school, and in the intervening years has become more religious, while his mother is a painter whom Maddy admired. Maddy interviewed Allen’s mother for the school newspaper, and dreamed of being a journalist, dreams she put on hold when she married. 

THAT’S A lot of a plot for a six-episode series, and I’m actually leaving out a few threads here. Portman lights up the screen, as she always does, although somehow she seems miscast as a housewife who bemoans her dull life. Her delicate beauty and intensity just seem to make her stand out.

Some of the dialogue about her squandered potential seems as if it came from a feminist manifesto, circa 1970, and all of Portman’s skill can’t make it any more interesting. “Why is everyone acting like there’s something wrong with me because I care?” she tells her husband. “All Baltimore is out looking for her and I’m the meshugena?... I have served you for 20 years and you think I’m only good for being a housewife.” 

Milton replies, “You never wanted to be anything else,” to which she responds, “I never tried to do anything else! Did you ever wonder why?” and breaks a dish.

The series, narrated by Cleo from the grave, tells how Maddie returns to her teen dreams of journalism as she tries to solve the mystery of Cleo’s murder, which draws her into the dangerous underworld that Cleo worked in; the later episodes are filled with Maddy’s trippy nightmares. Cleo often speaks portentously about her connection to Maddy, saying, “The end of my story was the beginning of yours,” and “You wanted to tell everyone’s story, but your own.”  

In the scenes that flash back to her high-school years, Portman seems most at ease, bringing to mind a quote by the late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael that Sissy Spacek was more believable as a teen in Coal Miner’s Daughter than when she played an adult: “When she was supposed to be a grown woman she looked like a kid dressed up in her mother’s clothes and wig.”

Portman is in her early forties, but she looks so young it’s truly jarring when she refers to herself as an “old lady.”

The series is at its best recreating the atmosphere of mid-’60s Baltimore, especially in the African-American community. It’s an uneasy blend of David Simon’s gritty stories of Baltimore crime, like The Wire and We Own This City, and a feminist True Detective, a mixture that can be jarring. But the strong performances by Portman, Ingram (who appeared in The Queen’s Gambit and Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth), and a superb supporting cast keep things entertaining. 

Season three of The Bear hits Disney+

THE THIRD season of The Bear came to Disney+ in Israel yesterday, and for those who loved the first two seasons, especially the second, it isn’t a moment too soon. The Bear is the story of Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) a perfectionist master chef who comes back to Chicago to take over his family’s sandwich joint after his brother Michael (Jon Bernthal) commits suicide. 

Eventually, Carmy decides to turn the sandwich place into a fine-dining establishment. He is aided on this quest by a host of crazy and wonderful characters, most notably breakout star Ayo Edibiri as Sydney, another greatly talented chef from a difficult background who is drawn to the discipline and rhythm of a restaurant kitchen. Cooking allows her, like Carmy, to flower creatively, coming up with innovative and delicious-sounding dishes. 

While previous seasons of The Bear were about running a restaurant the way The Sopranos was about gangsters – at its core, the main plot was just a way of telling a story about a dysfunctional family and the trauma of growing up with a mentally ill, narcissistic parent. Eventually, in the first few episodes of season three, the series actually starts to be about the restaurant.

Carmy decides that the menu should be completely different every day, a dictum that is impractical, expensive, and labor-intensive. He has long fantasy sequences in which some of the celebrity chefs with whom he has worked, such as Daniel Boulud, make appearances.

But it gets its original groove back as it portrays the psychological challenges of the characters, and we get to learn more about the backstory of Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) and how Michael helped save her life when she was at her lowest point, and Gary (Corey Hendrix), a former Triple-A baseball player, now a waiter. 

Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Carmy’s self-absorbed mother, and an episode in which Carmy’s sister, Natalie (Abby Elliot) goes into labor and reaches out to her is the emotional high point of the season and is a true reenactment of the terrors of childbirth. 

I would have liked to have seen more of Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson), the chef struggling with arthritis who is a Somalian refugee and veteran of ghastly wars. I hope he gets his own episode in season four. But you can expect the cast of The Bear to collect many more Emmys for this season.