Moderate spoilers ahead.
The first season finale of "Ozark" is easily its best episode so far, featuring a major surprise twist and setting up the character dynamics for the next season. It's smart, it's nervy, and it's very well executed. The show has proved consistently entertaining and easy to watch over its first twenty episodes. However, I wouldn't put it up there with "Breaking Bad" or "The Americans," or other similar prestige shows yet, because it hasn't shown much interest in digging very deeply into the psyches of its characters. It's more interested in the tricky twists and turns of its plotting, which is great, but I feel that the show could be more - especially considering the level of talent involved.
I appreciate that "Ozark" is very brisk for a crime show, and never lets the momentum flag, but I found myself having to suspend disbelief much more often than I was expecting. New problems are always cropping up that Marty, Wendy, or Ruth manage to solve or at least significantly delay after an episode or two, usually through elaborate manipulations or dealmaking. Sure, it's a nice change of pace that nobody seems to be able to keep a secret for more than two episodes, and Wendy not taking a backseat to Marty is great, but we're still operating in a world of wild coincidences and spectacle taking precedence over common sense. Jonah is practically a comic book character, a fourteen year old boy who has taken to money laundering like a pro, and seems to be on the verge of becoming a violent enforcer too. It makes his older sister Charlotte, who makes the kind of dumb mistakes that a real teenager would make, look incompetent by comparison. She's the family's voice of reason, but is portrayed as such a petulant annoyance that it's been difficult to sympathize with her very legitimate concerns. The irony is that "Ozark" has more interesting and engaging female characters than most similar thriller shows combined.
Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, and Julia Garner continue to be the show's anchors. "Ozark" boasts a very deep bench when it comes to onscreen talent. Adding to the pile of secondary characters mentioned in the previous post, we have Ruth's felon father Cade Langmore (Trevor Long), her uncle Russ (Marc Menchaca), and Russ's teenage sons Wyatt (Charlie Tahan) and Three (Carson Holmes). Then there are the much more dangerous, heroin producing Snells, led by Jacob (Peter Mullan) and Darlene (Lisa Emery). In the second season, we also meet the Navarro cartel's formidable lawyer, Helen Pierce (Janet McTeer). Many of them don't get to stick around for long, because that's the nature of the show, but nearly everyone gets to make a memorable impression. Right now Emery's Darlene is the character I'm most impressed with, since there aren't many female villains on television that feel so viscerally dangerous. There's also Harris Yulin's Buddy, who makes for a great wildcard. And it's always great to see Peter Mullan and Janet McTeer in anything.
Ruth Langmore remains the show's best character, however, and it's clear why Julia Garner got so much attention for her performance. "Ozark" is at its best when it's following Ruth's struggles to balance her loyalty to Cade with her loyalty to Marty. Watching her bounce between two terrible father figures, while also doggedly looking after Wyatt this season, is way more compelling than watching the Byrdes being terrible parents to their kids (and several others) and letting their family disintegrate as they struggle to keep the cartel happy. Marty and Ruth's relationship is especially poignant, because it's clearly not going to end well, and everything that Marty is offering her is a trap, but Ruth can't see it yet. I've already been spoiled for how her storyline ends, and I'm bracing for it.
Most of my dissatisfaction with the show probably comes from my expectations of it being too high. "Ozark" was a critical darling in its early years, and positioned as a successor to many of the prestige programs I've enjoyed. However, it simply isn't interested in being the kind of more nuanced, headier drama that I prefer - at least not consistently. I expect that the remainder of the series will go down easier, once I've recalibrated a bit for this fact. The things that it does well - colorful characters, ratcheting tension, and explosive confrontation scenes - it does very well. And it's also been good at self-correcting, so I hold out hope for Charlotte becoming a better character by the end of "Ozark." However, I'm glad that the show is only four seasons long and reportedly ended on its own terms.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment