If you roam around the Ozarks and beyond with a lantern looking for one person who you can call ‘morally upright’ or ‘good’, I bet you will wind up with disappointment. Every character you see in the fourth and final season of this Netflix crime drama is either struggling, twisted, unhinged, or batshit crazy. But the medley of these eccentric characters, backed by a superlative script and direction, makes Ozark one of the best thriller-drama web series of the last decade.
The show began with financial advisor Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) trying to make amends for a Mexican drug cartel after a money-laundering scheme goes south. Only his idea of compensation is to set up a bigger laundering operation in the Ozarks region of rural Missouri. He, along with his wife Wendy (Laura Linney), daughter Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz), and son Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) moves from Chicago to Osage Beach, Missouri. From hereon begins a quest to stay alive while dabbling with the estranged relatives, local mafia, petty criminals, FBI and the Mexican drug cartels.
Whatever you can think of (or not) going wrong with their lives, it all happens. As the show heads towards its end, Marty and Wendy are struggling to keep their family together as the latter’s not-so-nice father is trying to gain their teenage children’s custody. Parallelly, a drug cartel boss Omar Navarro (Felix Solis) has landed in a US jail and wants the husband-wife duo to get him extradited to Mexico and in the process, take his name off the SDN (Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons) list.
Marty’s former associate Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) has gone berserk after the said drug cartel’s nephew Javi Elizonndro (Alfonso Herrera) killed her cousin Wyatt (Charlie Tahan). At the start of the new season, Ruth— spoiler alert — kills Javi, triggering another set of problems for the Byrdes. All this while, a private investigator Mel Sattem (Adam Rothenberg) is on Byrdes’ tail to find Wendy’s missing (and dead) younger brother, Ben Davis (Tom Pelphrey). Yes, a lot is happening all the time. Chances are if you sneeze, blink or look away for a second, you would miss some crucial detail. It is a messy and convoluted world. But the overcrowded world of Ozark is so intricately stitched together that you cannot help but marvel at the show creators’ (Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams) cinematic brilliance.
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Dark, gritty world of Ozark
The fourth season is a culmination of what Dubuque and Williams have built up episode by episode in the last five years. It is not uncommon to see sequels and seasons not match up to the success and expectations of the initial film/season. There are far too many follow up sequels and seasons that have not fared well, for example, House of Cards, Dark, Money Heist and many more. But Ozark has managed to stay on track, and not lose momentum.
A world where psychological trauma and physical violence are bedfellows, it can be difficult to create a cinematic feel that remains just the right amount of grim, scary while still being artistically aesthetic. Cinematographer Ben Kutchins has managed to build a world here which is an extension to the tight narrative.
The F-word has increasingly become a lazy tool for writers to evoke a sense of ‘I mean business’ or ‘I am badass’. The Ozark writers also don’t shy away from dropping the overused cuss word of the 21st century. But it never seems too much on the nose. For instance, the fan favourite Ruth Langmore hardly ever speaks a sentence devoid of f***. But a local girl such as herself who has been helping her father with petty crimes in the community since she was three years old, the language is a part of her personality. It is impossible to imagine someone other than Julia Garner playing this role. She is equal parts thrifty, vulnerable, street smart, ballsy and scared as Ruth, a character who grew up as a young local criminal to an heir to the biggest land in the Lake of Ozarks. As someone says, she is a “goddamn redneck success story”. She is the show’s attempt at exploring the ultimate American Dream.
By the time we reach the final season, Jason Bateman and Laura Linney as the Byrde couple have climbed the ranks of the social and crime world. If we keep their innumerable crimes and illegal businesses aside, their success story is one for the books. Bateman and Linney complement each other. Bateman as Marty may have led the family into the gory world of money laundering, forging ties with drug cartels. But it is Linney as Wendy who evolves to be more dangerous and unhinged.
At one point, she checks herself into a medical facility to guilt her children into not leaving the family to move in with their grandfather. Oh wait, that sounds like most of our on-screen Desi mothers! It’s not just that, she has also got a handful of people including her sibling killed to nurture her interests. Their trajectory from a seemingly ‘stable’ couple from Chicago to the most powerful ones in the Midwest makes for a thoroughly engaging watch. “Money doesn’t know where it came from,” says Wendy in the last episode, a sombre reminder of how ‘money’ has completely warped their family into something unrecognisable and perhaps, beyond repair.
(Edited by Prashant)