Hard times in Baltimore

In his 1977 song, Randy Newman immortalised Baltimore as a “hard town by the sea”, where there was “nowhere to run to” and “nothin’ here for free”. On the small screen, Newman’s description of Maryland’s biggest city has been reinforced by shows like the ground-breaking police procedural Homicide: Life on the Streets and Baltimore native David Simon’s The Wire. Baltimore is indeed, if you believe what you see on TV, a place where “Man, it’s hard just to live, just to live”.

Israeli-American director Alma Har’el’s adaptation of Lady in the Lake, the 2019 novel by Laura Lippman, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, is set in the deeply racially divided, morally murky and paranoid world of the hard town by the sea in the 1960s. Inspired by the true story of two unrelated deaths that took place in the city in 1969 — the death of an 11-year-old Jewish girl and the mysterious death of a 33-year-old black woman — the novel explores the different ways in which these two murders were covered by the predominantly white media, using it as a starting point for an intertwining fictional tale of two very different women and their struggles to realise their ambitions and freedom in the oppressively male-dominated world of the era, set against the battle for civil rights and the aftershocks of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The show shifts the action slightly earlier to 1966, putting the looming assassination in the future rather than the past but, like the novel, the story here is one told through the eyes not of the tough Baltimore men we’re used to seeing on TV but rather it’s often neglected and marginalised women.

Natalie Portman, making her first foray into television, stars as Maddie Schwartz, a bored Jewish housewife who, after the disappearance of a young Jewish girl who grabs headlines and consumes the community, decides to walk out on her husband and son on Thanksgiving to move to a predominantly black working class neighbourhood and pursue her neglected dream of becoming an investigative journalist.

Her story is told in parallel with that of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) a young black woman of similar age who struggles to raise her children, juggling a job as a window model in a department store by day and working nights in a nightclub owned by a powerful black numbers boss (Wood Harris) who has her best friend under his control. As Maddie’s investigation and Cleo’s embroilment in the underworld bring them to a point of fatal convergence, we’re led through the two very different sides of divided Baltimore society on a mysterious, convoluted noirish journey towards self-realisation for both the protagonists, at great cost to themselves and those who love them.

Har’el, who began her career as director of video-art and music videos, has a particularly impressive talent for creating visually spectacular scenes that make dark fantasy out of the inner worlds of the two women,and these are easily the most impressive parts of the show, marking it as more than just a feminist, racially sensitive neo-noir. Portman and Ingram bring sensitivity and emotional depth to their performances and the overriding atmosphere is tense, dark and mysterious.

It may take some time to kick into full gear but once it does, there’s something undeniably strange and often beautiful about the two stories in Lady in the Lake and the ways in which they intersect, diverge and finally twist together. By the end, Baltimore remains a hard town by the sea where for women as much as men, its hard to live — but if they fight hard enough, they can escape from it.