Ozark — Review

Ozark, the new Netflix series, is certainly not without its flaws. It has a slow start, characters so compromised as to be sometimes too unbearable, even if the intention is just that and limps a little bit at the starting gates, slowly finding his very personal but very dark voice.

It is also a lucid reflection on the American dream as seen in countless series and films. It not only examines the dark side of the all-American obsession with the self-made man, which pushes people to do everything to achieve the dream of total mobility made available to US citizens. But he combines it according to the classic stylistic features of cinema and then completely overturns its meaning.

Let’s take the classic plot of this kind of story. There is a family living in a big city. For some reason, the family is forced to change their lives and move to a small community, usually in the countryside. There, at first he struggles to adapt, but then as he understands the dynamics of the community, he begins to take back the reins of his own life.

In Ozark we have all this, with the substantial difference that, while country life is usually the excuse to rediscover true values ​​and turns out to be better, more harmonious and healthy than city life, the town where the Byrde family takes refuge (to escape the threats of a drug cartel, not to leave the corruption of the metropolis behind) is a den of vipers. An apparently beautiful place (an artificial lake surrounded by nature), but populated by violent “rednecks”, whose poverty pushes them to criminal acts out of pure survival instinct. It is an absolutely hostile and bleak vision of the province, a land of dangers instead of the classic idyll to which American productions have accustomed us. And it’s a refreshing point of view.

Like vultures pouncing on a carcass in an attempt to tear at least a small strip of it so the characters of Ozark quarrelfully share the remains of an America devastated by the economic crisis, corrupt and sick. The problem, perhaps, is that the vision is so distressing and the characters so beyond redemption that it is difficult for the spectator to identify. Even in Breaking Bad, Walter White had proletarian revenge traits that stimulated the viewer’s empathy. Ozark’s protagonists — including Jason Bateman — all get in trouble out of greed and become more of a role model than a plausible drift of us all.