Shot in nacreous bruise-green twilight, the Netflix crime series Ozark looks nasty. The show leaves the viewer with the impression that it is fantastically violent. In fact, this impression is misleading -- compared to an abattoir like Westworld, there is almost no violence at all: in the nine hours of the show's second series (2018) that I have watched, four murders have been shown on-screen -- that is, about one killing every two hours. So what is the source of the program's constant and menacing aura of hyperbolic violence? I think this impression stems from several characteristics: first, everyone curses all the time and exchange the most lurid and ghastly threats; second, there are usually a couple of beat-downs per episode -- although these sequences are staged in a matter-of-fact way and, often, so short as to seem, more or less, ephemeral. But the green shadows and the portentous rumbling of the soundtrack and the eerie horror-film tracking and gliding camera motions create an omnipresent atmosphere of threat -- if the camera tracks a car or slides sideways smoothly to follow a character, we always expect something awful to occur. Since, Ozark is a family melodrama involving the fortunes of a husband, wife, and their two children, we also fear that the children will be harmed -- in Ozark (second series), there's even a cheerful-looking baby on-screen for half of the episodes (the hero and heroine have killed his daddy) to ramp up the suspense.
The film's premise is pretty much exhausted and, although the show remains absolutely gripping, it's hard for me to imagine that there's much of this grim terrain remaining to be explored. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is a genius accountant and money-manager whose work for a Mexican cartel went horribly wrong. He's been forced into laundering immense amounts of money for the drug-runners. In this enterprise, he's joined by his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and his two children, a pale, precocious son, and the family's rebellious teenage daughter. It's always one thing after the other for poor Marty. Either he's being gruesomely threatened by the drug cartel and its sinister lawyer, a tall skinny woman with a blonde Valkyrie hair-do or he's arguing with his wife about her past infidelity (she's cuckolded him with a business partner offed by the Mexicans), or attempting to reassure his two increasingly restive and cynical children that all will well when it's increasingly apparent that nothing will be well at all: his son is money-laundering himself and his daughter has hired a lawyer so that she can be "emancipated" from the family and its nightmarish business. When Mexican gangsters aren't trying to assassinate him, Marty and Wendy are relentlessly persecuted by local villains, including the horrific Snell's, a hillbilly couple that about the most terrifying thing on TV. Sometimes, corrupt local politicians try to shake them down. Everyone constantly blackmails and extorts everyone else. And, further, Marty and Wendy's proposal to build a casino on the Snell's land at the Lake of the Ozarks have run afoul of the Kansas city mob -- killers from that gang are also hovering around the edges of the action. The Snell's, Jacob and Darlene, are like Tom Bodett (of Motel 6 fame) or Roy Blount, Jr. crossed with Hannibal Lecter -- Darlene in particular is so ruthless and relentlessly menacing that she terrifies her poor husband, Jacob (and Jacob is a very scary good ole boy himself -- he and his wife are the local heroin kingpins.) Marty and Wendy are also in business with the Langmore's, another criminal clan, only marginally less intimidating than the lethal Snell family. The best thing in the show is Ruth, the petite blonde teenage girl who serves as the criminal mastermind for the Langmore family -- she's played by Julia Garne, taking a leaf from the role played by Jenifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, and, I think, she's one of the most compelling actresses on TV. Indeed, everyone in the show is excellent -- the menagerie of crooked cops and politicians are all indelibly nasty and there's a putrid gay FBI agent, a little like the fanatic zealot played by Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire. The show is a swim in a sewer and everyone is, more or less, corrupt and vicious. Jason Bateman's exceptionally involute and claustrophobically controlled performance is also key to the show's staying power -- Marty Byrde scarcely reacts to any of the horrific trouble in which he always finds himself. His cell-phone plays crickets when he gets a call, usually someone summoning him to a meeting in some miserable dive or remote country lane where he can be threatened, pushed around, and forced to participate, if reluctantly, in the torture of one or the other of his associates. When told by the Mexican cartel's lawyer that the gangster are planning to kidnap and torture his children to death, Marty gulps hard so that his throat bulges a little and his eyes seem to protrude only slightly -- a tiny vein in his temple dilates for a second, but otherwise he maintains his steely composure. A little of this goes a long way and Marty has to gulp down his terror about every half-hour in the film and, although the effect is always impressive, I don't think his muted, strangulated performance is really sustainable in the long run. On the other hand, if he were more demonstrative, I think the show might by unwatchably hysterical.
From beginning to end, the show is a guilty pleasure. The nature of this pleasure isn't pretty and it's not pleasant to describe: someone is bullying someone else, but, then, a bigger and more horribly effective bully knocks the wind out of the first bad guy. The entire show consists of ever more awful villains each strutting for their short period on screen and, then, being cowed and humiliated by even more vicious bad guys. In the opening episode, a rude teenage kid at a car-park won't even look up at the skinny lady lawyer who is trying to question him. We immediately sympathize with lady lawyer. The kid uses an expletive and tells her to get off the property. This kind of stupid and rude behavior deserves come-uppance and we get that in spades -- a Mexican gunman blows off the rude kid's hand and, as he pleads for mercy, pumps about eight shots into his face. It's satisfying in an awful kind of way because we know the logic of the show is, ultimately, to expose the cruel and importunate arrogance of the lady lawyer to some even more awful retribution -- although what this will be we don't know. In one scene, the bad guys are coming to kill a member of the Snell family who has crossed the Mexican mob. When the bad guys close in, the patriarch Jacob Snell takes things into his own hand by bludgeoning his own son to death -- the code demands a sacrifice and to save Darlene, who has a propensity for committing sudden, enraged murders, Jacob has to kill the boy. Darlene won't forgive him and, in fact, murders Jacob in episode nine (or nineteen, depending how you count). But before the murder, there is a flash-back and we see the first time that Jacob Snell laid eyes on his destiny -- he was Vietnam vet come back to the Ozarks and the young and beautiful Darlene seduces him, yanking him out of a small-town café to a cold-looking dark lake where they go skinny-dipping. To establish the year that this occurs, the soundtrack plays Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman". At the end of the episode when Darlene hugs the dying Jacob in a sort of awful, white-trash Liebestod, the camera swoons upward. Jacob's fading vision gives us a POV that shows Darlene as she looked when she first seduced him forty years earlier and, as the camera cranes upward, we hear "Wichita Lineman" again. There's a lot of wish fulfillment in this show -- people stalk around punching each other out while their pockets are literally lined with greenbacks. Millions of dollars are stashed in caskets and walls. So bad guys get their comeuppance, bullies are bullied, and, everyone is flush with cash.
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