Heisenberg in Missouri
Where is exactly does Ozark, a new series on Netflix starring Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, possibly hope to take us that we haven’t been before in say Breaking Bad or Weeds or Justified?
Well, sure okay, the Ozarks. And yes, there are lots of trees, lakes, and flocks of hillbillies roaming o’er the land. But heck, they have that in Maine.
The premise is that Marty (Bateman), a deeply unhappy financial advisor of no consequence except to the Mexican drug dealer for whom he is laundering money, must flee Chicago with his family (Linney plus a sullen teenage daughter and her younger brother), in order to escape meeting the fate of his erstwhile partner in crime, who stole from the cartel and is currently – as we are told by the pair of gay FBI agents now shadowing Marty – dissolving in a barrel somewhere.
Got it?
Of course you do. You’ve seen this whole Mr. Smith Goes to Juarez routine many times by now. Yet, somehow it has never seemed so unbelievable as it does here.
Okay fine – Ozark is infinitely more believable than Catherine Zeta Jones’ turn as Martha Escobar in Crash.
Still, when Marty, a gun to his head, improbably uses his last words to pitch the cartel boss on laundering money down in the “Redneck Riviera” (an area known for lakes and cash businesses), we are left wondering why he didn’t also try to sell the guy aluminum siding.
This fantasy that Marty can talk himself over any obstacle pops up again and again.
He isn’t smooth talking, mind you. Nor is he delivering impassioned pleas.
Marty works with the cool, crisp logic and buzzwords of the boardroom. He refers to “extraneous detail” when arranging a break-in with a petty criminal. When she presents her demands, he informs her that they would be “counter-productive.”
Unexpected and quite a bit of fun to watch, but come on…
This ability reaches an absurd zenith when Marty convinces a local redneck family not to kill him and steal his suitcase containing many millions of dollars in it.
Let me ask you: when you were getting pushed around on the playground because your mother made you wear corduroy pants, were you able to dissuade your tormenters with unimpeachable reasoning? Didn’t think so.
Still, Bateman plays the character so well that we are tempted to simply turn off our disbelief and enjoy watching Marty confront hardened criminals as if he were doing no more than advising a client to switch to a Roth IRA.
He is threatened with the murder of his entire family. He responds, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that,” as if the man had simply made an unreasonable demand.
We like it. But coupled with other aspects of the show, the lack of plausibility becomes overpowering.
The problem is in the writing, of course.
This is the kind show that likes to start off with VO narration full of platitudes about life, laundering money, etc.
It’s the kind of show where the FBI inexplicably has an entire file on a small time local hood of only 16 years old…whose uncle the gay FBI agent then seduces.
It’s the kind of show where a mother informs her children that their father is a money launderer and they get mad at her for telling them.
We get the impression that Ozark’s creators were eager to avoid following the path well-trodden by similar shows. But in zigging when others zagged they appear to have wound up…well, somewhere called the Ozarks, where the usual laws of chance, basic human psychology, and motivation no longer seem to apply.