“Lady in the Lake” combines two stories of tortured women. One of them is great

“You think every The story is your story,” Maddie Morganstern's son Seth bitterly argues late in the Apple TV+ miniseries Lady on the Lake. This is a common accusation leveled by other characters at Maddie (Natalie Portman), a Jewish woman in mid-60s Baltimore who left Seth (Noah Jupe) and her husband Milton (Brett Gelman) to reinvent herself as a newspaper reporter. The series is narrated by Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram), a black woman who becomes the honored lady at the lake when her body is found thanks to Maddy's reporting. Much of Cleo's voice is addressed directly, with some disdain, to Maddie, such as when she says, “You came to the end of my story and made it the beginning of yours.”

Maddy's hunger to be the star of her own life, even if it means stealing that ability from other people, is one of the core conflicts of Lady on the Lake, and thus an idea worth dealing with often. But it's hard to watch the show without thinking that other characters — Cleo above all — should be more central.

The series, created and directed by Alma Har'el (Honey boy), adapted from Laura Lippmann's excellent novel in 2019. Like the book, it alternates between the two women's stories. Early on, there is discussion of how the Jewish and black communities, once crucial allies in the struggle for civil rights, had begun to drift away from this point in history. Even a few years earlier, Maddie and Cleo might have attended the same political rallies and exchanged notes about having sons around the same age or disappointing husbands. (Cleo is married to struggling comedian Slappy Johnson, played by Byron Bowers.) At this point, however, their only direct point of contact is when Maddie buys a dress that Cleo has just modeled at one of her jobs as a department store window model.

It's Thanksgiving, 1966, when Lady on the Lake it begins Maddy had long been unhappy in her marriage to Milton, but in ways she could never fully accept, let alone articulate. It takes the kidnapping of her high school friend Allan Durst's (David Cornswet) daughter to shake her out of her complacency and decide to start over. Cleo, meanwhile, dreams of working for a pioneering black state senator, but is tainted by a lifelong relationship with local crime boss Shell Gordon (Wood Harris, back in The wire country, but playing a very different kind of gangster). The women are both friendly with police officer Ferdie Platt (Y'lan Noel) – and Maddie ends up being much more than just friendly with him – but their stories run largely in parallel until the body is found in the lake and Maddie realizes she can use Cleo as a springboard for the career she dreamed of writing for the high school paper.

Moses Ingram has been busy since her starring role as Jolene The Queen's Gambit, and she is excellent here. Cleo is constantly flying from job to job, alliance to alliance, crisis to crisis. She's a master at code-switching, but the effort clearly wears her down, especially since she knows how limited her options are thanks to being Black, a woman, and someone who works for Shell Gordon. Cleo's focus material in the first half of the miniseries is dynamite.

It's Portman who's the problem. She is a huge talent, capable of titanic performances like the Oscar winner Black Swan. But there are times when she can seem a little too studied or educated, and instead of seeing the character, you see Natalie Portman working really hard to play the character. This is unfortunately one of those cases. She goes all-in with a Baltimore accent—if Maddie's feeling inviting, she'll offer you a “wooden glass”—but struggles to be emotionally present in most scenes. It would be one thing if Portman and Harrell did that in the scenes where Maddy was still trying to be convincing as an obedient Jewish housewife. But it's just as unclear when Maddie moves into a cheap apartment in a Black neighborhood and starts hanging out with Ferdie and Judith Weinstein (Mikey Madison), the pot-smoking daughter of her landlord. There never seems to be a real Maddie, be it Morganstern (her maiden name) or Schwartz (Milton's last name). In the early episodes, the energy level plummets whenever the action cuts from Cleo to Maddie. Once the body is discovered and Cleo's presence is largely limited to flashbacks and narration, Maddie's elusive nature goes from frustrating to crippling.

However, Har'el gets this great performance from Ingram. And it brings a distinct visual flair that's often missing from these kinds of prestige-bait miniseries. But Lady on the Lake at times it gets too adventurous for its own good, with a penultimate episode filled with nightmares, fantasies, and even musical numbers that are interesting to watch in isolation, but which come at the worst possible time, slowing down the whole momentum of the intersecting plot lines.

The finale might focus more on the Cleo half of things and bring relatively satisfying resolution to everyone's story. But even though all the other characters in the Lady on the Lake knowing that Maddie is futilely trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room doesn't make these scenes any more interesting to watch.

Its first two episodes Lady at the Lake begin streaming July 19 on Apple TV+, with additional episodes released weekly. I have seen all seven episodes.