Ozark

There are ten episodes of Ozark on Netflix (2017) and the series is an excellent, a superbly crafted crime program.  The show has excellent actors, is well-written, and continuously surprising -- although the general trajectory of the narrative is clear enough, the program's creators deliver surprising twists and turns to the story and the show's final episode convincingly integrates the disparate strands in the plot into a satisfying climax.  The show purports to realism and so there aren't the strange flights of fancy that sometimes elevate Fargo, a similar program, into higher and more complex realms.  Further, Ozark is tightly coiled -- it's pieces all fit together and so it doesn't display the innovative anti-narrative and centrifugal energy that makes Twin Peaks (The Return) so enormously fascinating -- and, it should be said, frustrating.  That said, Ozark is more entertaining in a conventional sense -- it doesn't stretch the limits of the form and the action is neatly focused.  You won't be inspired by Ozark but the show is dependably and continuously entertaining in the best sense -- it has fascinating characters that the writers seem to care about intensely and this concern translates into a convincing and superbly performed narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.  This program's narrative innovation is to hurl the viewer into the action without any explanation and, then, provide a convincing exposition in later episodes.

The show begins with an assault on the viewer that develops in directions that don't seem fully plausible at first.  A financial planner, played with weasel-aplomb by Justin Batemen (he looks like Rob Lowe but is a better actor) finds himself in trouble with a Mexican drug cartel.  Bateman lives in Chicago and he's apparently a kind of "everyman" and his lack of distinction, his bland good looks and rapid-fire salesman's delivery, provides the viewer with an effective and gripping point of access to the mayhem that will follow.  Bateman's Marty Byrde is married, unhappily, to Wendy (also excellently played by Laura Linnea). Wendy is having a love affair and seems remote from her husband.  Who can blame her? -- he is addicted to watching a rather inexpressive porno-video:  it shows an anonymous woman providing oral sex to a man that we can't identify and, then, some sexual intercourse, also shot from a particularly non-revealing vantage.  (We immediately wonder why Marty is watching repeatedly this uninteresting sex clip -- later, the basis for his fascination will be revealed.)   A group of Mexican villains, the sort of sleek, menacing and handsome bad hombres, that Trump probably thinks are real, invade the story.  They torture and summarily kill Marty's business partner and his wife.  Marty, who is very glib and self-assured, talks his way out of being murdered for money that he and his partner seem to have skimmed from the drug cartel.  Marty has learned that there are business opportunities at Lake of the Ozarks in southern Missouri; we repeatedly hear that Lake of the Ozarks has more shoreline than California.  He pleads with the drug lord (a sort of clone of the well-manicured and soft-spoken Ricardo Montalban) to be allowed to go to Lake of the Ozarks and launder money for the mobsters.  Surprisingly, the gangster-boss agrees to this and Marty with his wife and two children flee to southern Missouri where the hero starts to launder money with surprising skill and agility.  In the course of this rapid-fire first episode, Wendy's lover is collateral damage -- he is hurled from an 80 story window from a lakeside condo south of the Chicago loop.  Marty confronts Wendy and agrees that their marriage is over and that they are now nothing more than "business partners" in the money-laundering scheme.  These events all transpire with lightning rapidity and, although parts of the story seem profoundly implausible -- for instance, why is Marty so exceptionally skilled at laundering money? -- the accelerated pace of the narrative keeps us involved and not questioning aspects of the story that seem improbable.  (SPOILER ALERT:  I will reveal plot points of significance below and if you want to enjoy the show for its intricate and surprising narrative, I suggest that you stop reading at this point and just tune in the show.)  Only in the 8th episode, a show that is entirely flashback to 2007, do we learn that Marty has been complicit in drug-money laundering for many years, that he is a trusted lieutenant in the cartel's economic schemes, and that Wendy has also been complicit in the criminal enterprise:  in effect, the couple have made a Faustian bargain with the drug cartel, hence, Marty's initially surprising alacrity with money laundering.

By the end of the first show, the program's story has moved from Chicago to rural Missouri and, at Lake of the Ozarks, the show plays out one of the primordial plots in American fiction and the movies -- this is the story of the brash urban City Slicker, who finds himself trapped in the country and surrounded by apparently clueless "rubes."  Of course, the rubes have their own culture and ethics and they turn out to be, if anything, more criminal, more sophisticated in their scheming, and more lethal than the big city criminals with whom the hero has been consorting.  The strength of Ozark is the depth of its characterization of rural, drug-laced criminality.  Immediately, Marty runs afoul of a clan of redneck trailer court trash who steal some of his money.  The leader of this interbred group of trailer trash is imprisoned but the clan is led, effectively and with murderous skill, by the man's 19-year old daughter,  Ruth Langmore.  This girl becomes Marty's reluctant ally and, later, partner and she is one of the best things in the show -- the girl's characterization (she's played by Julia Garner) bears some resemblance to the resourceful adolescent protagonist in another excellent crime movie set in the Ozark's Winter's Bone -- this is Dolly played by Jennifer Lawrence in that film.  Indeed, the wintry look of the show, it's dark green forests and blue twilights, all seem redolent of Winter's Bone and the menacing rednecks in Ozark are cousins to the people in the movie, but Ozark is longer, more complex, and cuts deeper.  Things are as corrupt at Lake of the Ozarks as in Chicago, although it's a different kind of rot:  Marty acquires a "titty bar" as it is called, then, an interest in a failing resort, a moribund funeral parlor (a business venture that proves to be convenient when it comes to corpse disposal), and tries to launder money through an evangelical church (the pastor is unwittingly distributing heroin in hymnals when he preaches on Sunday mornings from a boat on the lake facing a flotilla of other boats, most of them, apparently, occupied by junkies.)  There are corrupt local officials, nasty "entitled" trust-fund kids vacationing on the lake, and a clan of truly deadly hillbillies, the Snell family, who are, at once, principled and lethal and who boss the local criminal enterprises.  (The Snell's make a distinction between rednecks, who they despise, as deracinated and hillbillies -- when someone makes the mistake of calling Snell a hillbilly,  his deranged cobra of a wife blows the man's head off for the insult.)  The FBI is on Marty's trail and there is an anguished, homosexual agent pursuing him -- a nightmare character similar to the tormented FBI man played by Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire.  Marty and his family have rented a house from a sinister old man whose basement is full of guns.  The old man is dying and seems to be harboring a dark secret of his own and he lives on the bottom level of the home rented to Marty and family.  (In one scene, the old man, who is no stranger to violence, says that he is on the run for killing Jimmy Hoffa -- we aren't sure whether this is true or just an intimidating joke.)  Drug cartel thugs have Marty under surveillance and the FBI is watching as well and everything seems poised for a final Armageddon, a siege of Marty's lake-front home that will kill off everyone in the show.  But it's clear that the show is good enough to warrant another season and, so, midway the film starts to develop additional plot strands to eliminate the need to slaughter everyone in the final episode.  Although the final show is brutal enough, it keeps enough of the characters alive for the program to be renewed for another season. 

Here are the simple pleasures that Ozark provides.  The program is well-written and, ultimately, very believable. (I have to confess I don't understand the details of money-laundering which, in part, involves actual washers and dryers -- but this is probably a good thing.)  The program is unobtrusively filmed.  It's not too beautiful for its own good -- often a problem with Fargo -- and we are never distracted by fancy camera techniques, or jiggly hand-held work, or pretentious steadi-cam shots; the show is classically constructed and the technique makes sense without drawing attention to itself.  The program is remarkably deep with interesting characters -- the trailer trash are all delineated and the narrative doesn't condescend to anyone.  All of the acting is pitch-perfect.  Within the standard narrative of a film about gangsters and criminal enterprise, the show works interesting, and unanticipated, variations -- a good example is a scene in the last episode in which the preacher, whose wife has been vivisected by the bad guys, appears to drown his infant son.  He submerges the baby in the icy-looking waters of the lake for a long time, but the outcome of the sequence is completely unexpected, but brilliantly imagined.  Ozark is not gratuitously violent -- in fact, Marty is a character who doesn't carry a gun and has no stomach for violence of any kind; we know that he will use his wits to evade danger and will not debase himself with violent acts.  Although a lot of nasty stuff happens in the show, the worst of it is off-screen.  The program's length is exactly right for the complexity of the narrative -- there are no wasted episodes and no scenes that don't contribute to development of the plot.  This is quite remarkable because almost all extended TV series (for instance, Westworld) have hours of filler -- this show is all tendon and sinew.