Ozark season 2, Netflix, review: Jason Bateman's thriller still packs a punch
Jason Bateman comes across as rather keen to escape the unthreatening persona he fine-tuned with Arrested Development and frothy romcoms such as Game Night. Which is presumably why he signed on as star and producer of Netflix’s Ozark, a glum, occasionally gripping thriller about an everyman thrown into a life of crime in America’s hillbilly heartland which now returns for a second season.
No doubt he had in mind an arc similar to that of Bryan Cranston, who graduated from playing the idiot dad in Malcolm in the Middle to becoming the shaven-headed face of pure evil as Breaking Bad’s Walter White. But for Bateman pantomime villainy was ultimately something he stumbled into rather than achieved through peerless acting, when he clumsily defended his Arrested Development co-star Jeffrey Tambor against bullying accusations in an interview that went disastrously viral last May. (Bateman later did the decent thing by apologising to Jessica Walter, the Arrested Development actor who had weathered the brunt of Tambor’s rage.)
As a shopwindow for Bateman's ability to look toweringly peeved regardless of what else is happening, Ozark is a masterclass. He is compellingly grumpy as ghastly Marty Byrde, a corrupt accountant exiled with his family to the lawless wilds of Missouri’s Ozark region after falling foul of a drugs cartel back in Chicago. His performance – a wrecking-ball of desperation, seething anger and revulsion at what he has become – is almost worth the admission fee alone.
Marty’s partner had been cooking the cartel’s books – which earned him a stern rebuke from the drug lords (and also a bullet to the temple). But the gangsters very considerately spared our anti-hero’s life, on the condition that he build them a new criminal empire in the Ozarks, a rustic milieu presented as the equivalent of the “duelling banjos” theme from John Boorman’s Deliverance.
Last season, Marty, scheming wife Wendy (Laura Linney, having slightly too much fun as a Soccer Mom Lady Macbeth) and their unpleasant teenage children (Sofia Hublitz and Skylar Gaertner) were in the “getting to know you” phase of their relationship with their new home – a haven for redneck criminals, crooked cops and sleazy politicians.
Second time out, the stakes are even higher, with Marty and Wendy’s plans for a river casino attracting the unwelcome attention of the Missouri mob. An attempt to sway the local legislature into approving the casino meanwhile draws Wendy into the internecine world of Ozark politics, embodied by right-wing fixer Charles Wilkes (Darren Goldstein). And the Chicago cartel is still breathing down their necks, in the shape of Janet McTeer’s ruthless lawyer Helen Pierce.
Also returning is Julia Garner as Ruth Langmore, 19 year-old scion of a clan of ne’er do wells, and Peter Mullan – fresh from dancing badly to Roxy Music in Westworld – as the patriarch of (yet another) mob of rootin’ tootin’ backwoods dwellers. Poor white Americans are one of the few remaining demographics it is acceptable to caricature in US entertainment and Ozark doesn’t skimp in portraying the Langmores and their ilk as gap-toothed products of an American Gothic hellscape, where the sun never rises fully and everyone looks miserable at all times.
Absent is the manic humour that was Breaking Bad’s magic ingredient. Even more so than in the first season, Ozark is grindingly grim and the characters are more or less without redeeming features, with the possible exception of Garner’s Ruth, a big-hearted bumpkin desperate for something better.
But for those willing to stay the course, the blow-torch cheerlessness proves incrementally addictive and credit must go to Bateman and Linney, in particular, for committing to the bleakness. There’s no winking or Breaking Bad-esque retreat into violent slapstick here. Ozark is a headlong rush into flyover America’s heart of darkness and, as anthropological horror-show, packs an undeniable punch.
