Tag Archives: Jason Bateman

Cinematherapy for a Pandemic

Ozark

(Netflix 3 seasons)

Starring: Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Julia Garner

 

This is a great series to watch when you’ve got a bad case of cabin fever, because literally, every time the hero in this series sticks his head out the door, somebody tries to shoot it off. Marty Byrd (Bateman) is an unassuming, mild mannered albeit very creative accountant, who discovers when his partner dies that their company has been laundering money for a Colombian drug cartel. What’s worse, a whole bunch of it is missing. In the first of many fancy high wire acts that Marty and his wife Wendy (Linney) perform with increasing ease and without a net, Marty talks the drug lords into sparing his life so he can launder money for them by building a new Monte Carlo in, wait for it, the Ozarks.

 

This series is like a backwoods House of Cards. Jason Bateman and Laura Linney are like a Bogie and Bacall for a new generation, who battle together against the outside world and each other in order to find their way back to the garden with guts and glamor. Julia Garner, in a star-making role, is the white trash princess in the classic Greek sense of the word. Ruth Langford is triple scoop of disturbing deliciousness. All three seasons of Ozark reinvents for a pandemic generation the message that Depression-era audiences heard from Dorothy Gale… there’s no place like home.

—Bev West

 

Ozark studio image

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Filed under Cinematherapy, cinematherapy movies, No Place Like Home movies