It’s fitting the second episode of Lady in the Lake opens with a sustained conversation about surrealism. The year is 1947, and young Maddie is a budding journalist at her high school. She’s set to interview Louise Durst (Rebecca Spence), her boyfriend’s mother, whose paintings all but beg to be described — by Maddie, at least — as “surrealist.” But Mrs. Durst isn’t quite taken with the word. And when Maddie offers her own definition (“I think it has to do with the search for the marvelous,” she tells us in a tight close-up), the no-nonsense artist counters with a line that may well be the thesis statement for show and character alike: What could be less marvelous than trying to define yourself?
Except, of course, Mrs. Durst is irked because she clearly doesn’t approve of Allan’s dalliance with Maddie. But the young girl’s awe at those wild, colorful, and inexplicable paintings (shadowed faceless figures suggested by mere brushstrokes, greens, and yellows punctuated by darkened blotted silhouettes), as well as her definition of surrealism, speak to how writer-director Alma Har’el is crafting this adaptation of Laura Lippman’s novel. How will Maddie define herself? How will she move away from the surreality of her marriage? How will she take the reins of a life on her own?
But this flashback also gives us two key images: the mustard yellow couch we saw a young, naked Maddie laying in where a naked man was washing off some blood (Hal Durst, it turns out, who’s all too happy to regale the young Maddie when his wife has to take a call in the middle of her interview) and a painting by Hal (Mark Feuerstein) which features a lithe, pale, young woman laying in the middle of a lake in the nighttime — a young woman that bears Maddie’s face.
“You wanted to tell everyone’s story but your own,” Cleo says in voice-over, chiding Maddie for not letting us dwell on those details or how they fit together in the wifely life she then made for herself with Milton (Brett Gelman), the husband she just left behind.
But it’s clear Tessie’s death has rankled her for more reasons than she bears revealing. After having found the body, Maddie and Judith are taken into the station, where they’re questioned (and suffer antisemitic comments, what with the cops thinking Maddie had too nice of a nose to have looked Jewish). It’s there that Ferdie Platt first catches sight of Maddie, whom he’ll run into again soon after.
Meanwhile, the local Baltimore politics that’s playing backdrop to Cleo’s world is coming into focus: Cleo learns that her shady employer, Shell Gordon, once financed Myrtle Summer’s campaign. But now Summer, wanting to make the city more progressive and rebuking Gordon’s illegal numbers game shenanigans, has made herself a target: “His only business is segregation,” she tells her supporters. And Cleo’s stuck in between: she believes in Summer’s ideas, and that’s why she volunteers for her (all Cleo wants is a good school for her boys), but it’s Gordon who pays her bills.
In hopes of following Summer’s words to heart (“Our dignity can never be taken from us. Only surrendered.”) she asks the politician to give her a job. However, Summer cannot have anything associated with Gordon in her campaign anymore; surely, Cleo can understand that. But won’t she still film the very support she voiced at the meeting just the day before? The craven request all but breaks Cleo, who, in front of the camera, refuses to play along: “I can hold onto my dignity,” she intones as she quickly breaks down, “or I can provide for my boys.” (Ingram is electric in this scene, able to conjure up a lifetime’s worth of burdens she cannot do without; she’s a woman at the end of her rope, unable to see a way forward). She’s sick of her choices. She won’t be a pawn for Summer anymore. Crying and distraught, she leaves in embittered tears. (So much for keeping her dignity.) Best she just provides for her boys, especially her sickly one. It’s what drives her to Gordon’s office to ask for more work, and finds him asking for more in return.
Cleo’s not the only one needing to make desperate choices given her circumstances. After attending Tessie’s funeral (and being lovingly embraced by Tessie’s mother, a.k.a. Allan’s wife), Maddie finds herself adrift. Milton doesn’t understand what she’s doing. Her teenage son, Seth, is irritable and perhaps rightly offended by her actions. And her own mother can’t help but needle her about doing away with this nonsense of leaving her husband behind. And while she aims to do it all anyway, she finds it’s harder than it looks: Milton won’t give her money and she can’t even sell her own car without his signature. In a frantic montage set to (what else?) Barbra Streisand’s “Gotta Move,” we see Maddie at her wits’ end. And you understand why she’s driven to do what she does next.
She stages a robbery in her new downtown apartment. She rifles through her clothes, breaks some stuff, and hides her diamond ring in a potted plant, all before going to the diner nearby and using their phone to call the police. That’s how Ferdie ends up at her place, rightfully suspicious of her claims. But he humors her and shares how she and Judith had been persons of interest in the Tessie Durst case (“some lesbian crime sex or something,” he tells her), which appalls her, but thankfully, given that they found aquarium gravel in her fingernails, they have someone else in mind already. He also shares a tidbit that feels designed to help caution her about what’s to come: If the ring’s insured, it will take months before she gets the money (you know if she’s banking on it in the immediate future). Maddie may be slightly offended but knows better than to let it on she’s been found out, especially since that’s good information.
As was the aquarium gravel tip, which comes in handy when Bob Bauer (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a local columnist, comes calling at her door wanting information on Maddie and the Tessie case. Maddie is polite but finds the only way to get rid of him and keep him from further prying into her life is to give him that pet shop tidbit and have him leave right away.
The standoff at the pet shop that follows shows us that Stephan Zawadzkie (Dylan Arnold), who’d talked with Tessie about sea horses on Thanksgiving, is clearly off his rocker. He’s tied up his abusive mother and dances back and forth while wearing a gas mask (his mother had found him bathing with fish with that same mask earlier and beat him in what felt like a familiar fashion), all while lots of police have surrounded the store and ready themselves to shoot as needed.
Speaking of shootings, that’s what will close out the episode. Cleo assures Gordon she’ll do what it takes to be in his good graces. It’s why she convinces her husband Slappy to take a stand-up gig at the Pharaoh club (what better way to keep them both under his thumb than be their sole source of income?) and while he doesn’t quite deliver the clean act he’d promised (“You think Harriet Tubman had good pussy?”) it does give Gordon the sense that Cleo is all in. It’s what drives Reggie, his right-hand man, to delegate a cash drop to her. He’s learned from police that Zawadzkie’s mother is trying to pin the Tessie murder on a colored man with a black eye who was in the store that day (that’d be Reggie) so he decides to lay low and give Cleo, donning her signature blue coat, a job she only takes because she’s trying to stay in Gordon’s good graces. Little could she know she’d be delivering a wad of cash to pay for a hit on Myrtle Summer: the hit men even insist she drive them, as they were expecting Reggie and trust her no further than they can throw her. Of course the shoot out doesn’t quite go as planned: shots are fired inside the house but also outside of it since a guy with a shotgun was there. Was Myrtle killed? Will Gordon get found out? Cleo runs away … is this why she was eventually killed?
It’s all chaos, which is where Maddie’s life is these days, what with her spending her night getting high with Judith only to need to wave her away once Ferdie arrives, both as a courtesy to let her know what happened at the store but also, as it happens, to be seduced by a very stoned still-married Mrs. Schwartz: “Would it be unlawful if I offered you a beer, officer?” is delivered oh so beautifully by Portman. As Cleo literally runs for her life, Maddie figuratively drives off a cliff away from hers.
Clues & Things
• “My mother can smell everything, including my thoughts” is a pretty great line, and tells us plenty about Allan’s relationship to his artist mother (and also clues us into how much of a bad influence Maddie could be).
• Portman in a 1960s funereal garb will never not read like a Jackie callback (easily one of my favorite performances of hers). Funny since here’s a line from Lippman’s novel, in Cleo’s voice: “You had a plain pillbox hat, no veil. I bet people told you that you looked like Jackie Kennedy.”
• I have an inkling that Dream Book and the numbers game will keep popping up (Cleo’s son is no doubt not going to let that side hustle of his go, is he?)
• How lovely was that mannequin surrealist sequence during Cleo’s interview at Myrtle Summer’s office? So simple yet so effective at showing us how Cleo sees others seeing her.
• Almost as lovely as the Anaïs Nin–scored surrealist sequence where we see Maddie’s housewife life as a kind of playful, deadened tableau vivant. Here’s the full Nin quote Judith regales Maddie with, and which, like the Durst interview that opens the episode, feels like a thesis statement for Maddie’s life: “Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.”