Televsion Review: “Ozark” is an engaging, if familiar, tale of a normal dude wading into evil waters to protect his family.

Nicholas Laskin
Jul 27, 2017 · 8 min read

Hey, you! You like “Breaking Bad,” right? Or maybe you dig stories about ordinary men who slowly lose their souls trying to keep their loved ones safe from harm? Maybe you binge-watched the first two seasons of Netflix’s “Bloodline,” that swampy, sometimes sluggish Florida melodrama about a supremely fucked-up family? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then meet “Ozark”: Netflix’s newest and nastiest foray into slow-burning, character-driven crime drama.

Like the Whites, the Soprano, the Drapers and the Rayburns, the Byrde clan at the heart of “Ozark” are the kind of folks you would probably dread having dinner with. To say they’re screwed up would be an understatement. Here, though, they’re screwed-up in ways that are typical more of characters in television fiction than, y’know, people in real life. The mom, Wendy (Laura Linney), is cheating on her husband in dingy motel rooms while hubby videotapes her illicit encounters. 15-year old daughter Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) is mouthier and meaner than most adolescent girls, unloading most of her pent-up aggression on her shy younger brother Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), for whom “retard” is the kindest insult she can muster. And then there’s the matter of Byrde family patriarch, Marty (Jason Bateman, who also directed four episodes of this new show), and his preposterously ill-considered dealings with a Mexican drug cartel. The milieu that Marty finds himself mired in is one we’ve already seen plenty of in both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul”: the kind of shadowy, narcotics-fueled netherworld populated by subhuman cretins who seem to think nothing of executing children in front of their parents.

You’ll have to pardon me if my review of “Ozark” already feels a little reference-heavy. It’s just that this dour, intermittently gripping new drama sometimes feels more like a result of Netflix algorithm-crunching and demographic research (“if you thought ‘Santa Clarita Diet’ needed less zany cannibal humor, and more tweaker menace, then we’ve got the show for you…”) than honest-to-goodness narrative urgency. This is can be problematic if the first few episodes of your series involve characters making life-or-death decisions with no time to mull over or consider their reasoning, and “Ozark” occasionally suggests a show that isn’t quite sure what to do with its abundance of atmosphere and admittedly strong acting. The show is enjoyable enough in the moment, though: it’s got the agreeably glossy veneer of highbrow trash, even if its preferred mode of operating appears to be blue-collar backwoods noir.

“Ozark” is an unusual show in that a typical episode is packed with activity, and yet much of the time, it can feel like nothing of consequence is happening. “Ozark” doesn’t elongate its plotlines to a punishing crawl in the same way that, say, “Bloodline” did, but the show does take its sweet time establishing its central premise. That said, Bateman and Linney are mostly dynamite in roles that seem constructed in that old “Breaking Bad” mold: the milquetoast-dad-turned-crime-lord, and his wife who eventually turns into his business partner. These two manage to keep “Ozark” afloat when it threatens to sink, which is more often then it should. In spite of the show’s formulaic trappings, however, we do eventually come to care about the plight of these selfish, deeply messed-up people. Blame it on the enduring allure of Peak Antihero T.V.

The creators of “Ozark” are Mark Williams and Bill Dubuque. Mr. Dubuque, before this show, was mostly known for a handful of Hollywood screenwriting credits including the Robert Downey Jr./Robert Duvall-staring melodrama “The Judge” and also, “The Accountant,” the most ridiculous movie of last year (for those who didn’t see it, try imagining Ben Affleck as an autistic taxman who moonlights as an assassin). In both films, Dubuque takes his time in peeling back his protagonist’s layers of projected bullshit to reveal their often-unflattering true selves. Downey’s contemptuous protagonist in “The Judge” doesn’t become humanized until he returns to his hometown and learns to bond with his old man, just as Mr. Affleck’s transformation from mild-mannered numbers expert into cold-blooded hitman is the narrative gist for “The Accountant”.

In “Ozark,” Dubuque, Williams and the writers approach their story with that same basic approach, but the show often feels as if it’s struggling to fit the demands of the television medium. “Ozark,” though it has bad vibes and good acting for days, often feels either too rushed or not rushed enough. The show’s writers have a habit of settling for creepy black comedy when they should be setting dramatic gears in motion. Likewise, “Ozark” tends to hastily race through its plot machinations, when a concerted dose of texture might have allowed the story to breathe a bit more.

“Ozark” gets all its ducks in a row in the sturdy first episode, “Sugarwood”. Marty Byrde is first introduced at his day job as a financial advisor, giving the run-down to two prospective customers while silent footage of his wife fucking a stranger plays on his desktop screen. We quickly come to learn that Marty’s flagrantly unscrupulous business partner has cheated a very dangerous client — that would be the Mexican drug cartel I mentioned earlier — out of five million dollars. Because Marty is played by Bateman as another one of his coolly distant, vanilla confidence men, the character manages to talk these very scary dudes out of not killing him and his family. Marty’s restitution solution? Pack up the wife and kids and move to a quiet, unremarkable stretch of the Missouri Ozarks. There, he figures, Marty will quickly endear himself to the local populace and find a small business to use as a money-laundering operation. The fact that these unhinged Cartel minions even agree to this ludicrous proposition is only one of many disorienting twists to come.

Marty doesn’t even ask his family how they’d feel about relocating from their upscale Chicago townhouse to a dreary summer resort in the rural South. If they want to keep their heads attached to their necks, they don’t have much of a choice. The show’s second and third episodes watch as the Byrde family attempt to acclimate to their new surroundings without doing anything to attract the attention of the local authorities — or, worse yet, the town’s reputed underground figures, who wield more authority than the cops.

I will say that I admired the unhurried pace and cruddy, lived-in details that Dubuque, Williams and Bateman lend to their vision of our country’s battered Rust Belt demographic. There’s an engrossing, palpable sense that the Ozark locals aren’t willing to just let Marty strongarm his way into their lives, and it makes for some riveting drama when the show starts to finally build up steam about four episodes in. That said, the show’s depiction of the modern American South often feels as though it’s been made to appeal to the sensibilities of people who don’t actually live there. The local color in “Ozark” manifests itself in the form of a motley, recognizable collection of horny barkeeps, strip club proprietors, and, of course, meth-heads whose default expression seems to be the kind of thousand-yard stare you usually see on traumatized war veterans.

Methamphetamine and its production in the Ozark region has never been a secret, in life or in popular culture. The Jennifer Lawrence-starring “Winter’s Bone” used that same disturbing backdrop to tell a rough-hewn story about a young woman struggling to make it day-to-day in a landscape that was seemingly indifferent to human life. Though “Ozark” has its slick pleasures, there are only scant traces of the downbeat poetry of “Winter’s Bone” in this new Netflix show, which is mostly just another well-made drama about a well-heeled white antihero who is torn between his family and his dark private life. While the show’s familiarity makes it easy to watch, it also feels like something of a dinosaur in a year of television that has already given us “I Love Dick,” “The Leftovers” and the synapse-frying third season of “Twin Peaks”.

It should be noted that “Ozark” is often gorgeously directed. Bateman makes extensive use of long, unbroken static shots in the first two episodes, allowing the actors the space needed to tear into their dialogue, and the show is lit in a Fincherian greyish-blue color palate that is arresting. The sequences with Bateman and Linney often contain the unrehearsed intensity of live theater, and these moments make for some of the show’s most seismic, memorable grace notes. The Trump Country patois of the script also has a punchy, vulgar music to it. It’s a little too coarse to classify as wit, but it does admittedly take a kind of shameless skill to employ the sight of a man falling off a skyscraper and landing on the concrete with a gruesome SMACK as a kind of morbid punchline. The less said about the cold opening of the fourth episode, which cribs shamelessly from both Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” and also its inferior younger cousin “Blow,” the better.

In addition to “Breaking Bad” and “Bloodline,” “Ozark” also occasionally reminded me of this last season of Noah Hawley’s “Fargo,” whose plot was similarly preoccupied with oblivious white 1%er’s who go into business with malevolent foreign criminals who are smarter and more equipped to deal with life-or-death business than they could ever be. While I found that season three of “Fargo” was ultimately more a collection of beguiling doodles than a satisfying season of television, “Ozark” benefits from strong-minded, compelling acting and an unwavering central foundation. I could watch Jason Bateman condescend and talk down to people all day, and his work here is in the dark, emotionally removed vein of his underrated dramatic turn in the Joel Edgerton-directed thriller “The Gift”. If this ends up being the stepping stone to Mr. Bateman doing more dramatic work, I’m all for it.

Linney, meanwhile, is an actress with a proclivity for going over the top. Here, though, she reigns that side of herself in here to give an acutely observed and devastating portrait of a woman whose definition of a happy home life takes a radical turn for the worse. I was also taken with young Julia Garner (“Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”) as Ruth: a 19-year old spitfire with platinum blonde curls and considerable criminal ambitions who ends up positioning herself as Marty’s de facto prodigy. Ruth is the kind of live-wire character “Ozark” could use more of, and the show jumps to life whenever she’s onscreen.

“Ozark” does pick up a bit in its later episodes, which bring the Byrde’s reasons for relocation into sharper, more defined focus. There are some detours along the way that don’t really add up — the sordid plight of a depraved FBI agent who is told he’s a sociopath in nearly every scene he occupies, an unpleasant subplot about Jonah Byrde, the family’s youngest member, torturing and killing small woodland critters, etc. The show’s family drama is rock-solid, though, and as long as you don’t expect something with the same sense of weight as “Breaking Bad” or “The Sopranos,” you’ll probably be satisfied. Is it the next runaway Netflix mega-hit a la “Narcos” or “Orange is the New Black”? It’s hard to say. Ultimately, the show is too indolent, too moody, and ultimately, too safe to classify as a small-screen game-changer. That said, for fans of a certain kind of Men-Behaving-Badly drama, you could do a whole lot worse.

Grades: “Sugarwood,” B. “Blue Cat,” B-. “My Dripping Sleep,” B-. “Tonight We Improvise,” B+. “Ruling Days,” C+. “Book of Ruth,” A- “Bird Nest,” B.

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Movie and T.V. Reviews

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