Ozark final season review: The Byrde family saga ends on a bittersweet note-Entertainment News , Firstpost

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Back in Season 1 of Ozark, a few weeks into the Byrdes’ move from Chicago to central Missouri to launder $500 mn in five years for a Mexican cartel, Wendy (Laura Linney) tells her husband Marty (Jason Bateman) about a house she has just bought to help them reach their goal. Feeling “pretty good” about herself, she asks Marty what he had done for the family that day. “Bought a strip club,” he replies. It’s not the first or the last time “family” is invoked as justification by the Byrdes for their (mis)deeds. Over the four seasons of the Netflix series created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, the Byrdes laundered money by building a new church, got the pastor and his wife killed, fostered their orphaned son only to barter him to a cut-throat heroin producer for rights to build a riverboat casino, got a lot more people killed, convinced the FBI to take down a rival cartel, and blackmailed senators to gain political capital so they can launder some more — all for the sake of family.

From church to casino, pastors to politicians, everything and everyone is fair game if it’s for the family. Yet, Ozark presents a paradox: what the Byrdes canonise they’re also willing to destroy. Only not their own. This white upper-middle-class family of human laundromats have wiped out entire lineages: of their heroin-producing adversaries, the Snells; of rival cartel, the Lagunas; of their once-ally Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) and her family of small-time criminals. No matter how many lives are destroyed, the Byrdes’ tunnel vision allows them to endure. For every family that isn’t them is peripheral. Season 3 saw the Byrdes descend so deep into the amoral abyss Wendy ordered a hit on her own bipolar brother Ben Davis (Tom Pelphrey) to protect the nuclear family unit, and the others helped her cover it up.

The Byrde saga came to a conclusion after a 14-episode swan song. Few shows pull off a multi-season-long story, weaving together its mythology, plot threads and character arcs, with convincing payoff. Ozark managed to do it with its usual measure of cyan-soaked grit, tragedy and cynicism. In its four seasons, the show has been an unwieldy white antihero tale, played as excellent showcases for the talents of Laura Linney and Julia Garner, and peaked to a point in Season 3 where it could have been considered an heir apparent to Breaking Bad.

Ozark was an inconsistent drama that matched Netflix’s inconsistent standards, but it will still go down as one of better originals to have come out of the streaming platform.

It all began with a flier: “More shoreline than the whole coast of California.” Marty, a financial adviser in a blue checked shirt, picks up a crumpled flier with his bound hands to make a desperate plea to the Navarro drug cartel’s lieutenant holding a gun to his head, after his business partner was stupid enough to steal $8 mn from them. Promising he can launder the cartel’s money much more efficiently if given a second chance, Marty uprooted his family from the affluent suburbs of Chicago without notice. On getting to the Ozarks and setting up base, the Byrdes ran into plenty of complications along the way: local criminal enterprises, rival cartels, law enforcement, political opponents and their own rebellious teens. With the constant threat of death, the Byrdes may have seemed like victims, but the four seasons have proven they’re more often the victimisers, dragging so many of the innocent and not-so-much down into their vortex of violence.

The Langmores, the Snells, the Kansas City Mafia and the Navarro cartel all paid a much heavier price, while the Byrdes endured. At its core, Ozark has always been a story about two families whose crimes are divided by their social class: the upper-middle-class Byrdes are white-collar criminals who want to play kingmakers while the poor Langmores are blue-collar criminals who are tired of living in poverty. The fiery, entrepreneurial Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) simply wants to break the vicious cycle of drugs, crime and tragedy that has been a part of her family for five generations so she and her cousins, Wyatt (Charlie Tahan) and Three (Carson Holmes), can enjoy better lives and longer life-spans. However, once the fates of the Langmores and the Byrdes intertwined, their ambitions struggled to co-exist. The Langmores ultimately become victims of the chaos created by the Byrdes in their dealings with the cartel and the Snells.

What prevented Ozark from reaching the heights of Breaking Bad has often been its inability to transcend the trappings of a typical crime drama: one too many turf wars, betrayals, and shocking deaths have been employed to create conflict. Divided into two parts, the final season added fresh threats. To reach the finish line, the Byrdes must overcome obstacles thrown in the way by the FBI, a vengeful Ruth, a PI named Mel Sattem (Adam Rothenberg) breathing down their necks, Wendy’s father Nathan (Richard Thomas) who’s come looking for his son Ben, the CEO of a pharma company with supply chain disruptions, and as many as three different Navarro cartel supremos in Omar (Felix Solis), his headstrong nephew Javi (Alfonso Herrera), and Javi’s mother Camila (Veronica Falcón) trying to fill a power vacuum. Part 1 had ended with Javi killing local crime boss Darlene (Lisa Emery) and her new groom, Wyatt, to tie up loose ends, setting the stage for a fresh chain of violence in Part 2. Ruth, having barely gotten over Ben’s death, goes into rage mode after her cousin’s murder. Garner is MVP again, channelling the deep-seated grief in full-throated screams of agony and quiet cries of despair. Ruth’s vengeance however throws a monkey wrench in the Byrdes’ plan to go legit. A clean exit proves harder than they hoped for.

Garner’s name-making run will be what Ozark is remembered for. How Ruth climbed her way out of the backwoods from a petty thief to Marty’s apprentice to going out on her own has been the show’s single greatest character arc. Even when Ozark got too comfortable in a familiar groove, Garner was always there to pick up the slack, shading Ruth’s potty-mouthed ferocity with a vulnerability. What Ruth lacked in size, she made up for in sheer guts, ready to stand down the most intimidating foes. If she is often screaming her lungs out to be heard, it’s because she is the only woman in a family full of men. She is a young woman forever underestimated due to her family’s notoriety and every presumption about rednecks. She has got the street smarts and the desire to learn, if not a college education. Her dream to be “the first clean Langmore in five generations” was sadly short-lived, and there is bound to be inevitable debate over her deserving a better ending than the show gives her. Ruth and her vocal feats of profanity will continue to have a life of their own in YouTube compilation videos and Twitter GIFs.

Here is Ruth describing the Byrdes, bringing her usual verve to vulgarity: “They will tear everything you have to the ground, and somehow, they’ll make you feel like next time it’ll all be different. Because you wanna believe. They’ll make you feel like they fucking care. But Wendy, she’s fucking soulless. She will rip your heart out of your chest if it helps her get what she wants. She’s like a fucking predator that doesn’t even know why it’s killing anymore. And Marty. He pretends to care. But, really, he doesn’t have any real emotion, or else he’s too fucking cunt-struck to even know who he is anymore. Do you really think everything you do is to protect your family? Are you really that fucking shut down?”

You can’t spell T-R-U-T-H without Ruth, can you?

In terms of character studies, Wendy has always been another fascinating one. If she started off as a wife plunged into a nightmare, she proved over the seasons to be the most likely to land on her feet. By Season 3, she was personally dealing with Omar Navarro as his go-to contact. By Season 4, she was the one calling the shots. Wendy wasn’t like Skylar in Breaking Bad, a moral obstacle to an immoral husband. The level of conniving she was capable of outshined Marty’s as she became the family’s true criminal mastermind. Because her pathology came from a place of deep-seated dissatisfaction. She used her knowledge and talents working on political campaigns, a career she had given up to raise kids, to turn any hurdle to her advantage. While Marty was constantly looking for a way out of their criminal enterprise, she was looking for a way to thrive in it. She wanted to be the one behind the wheel, even if she ended up driving the family off a cliff. Wendy was thus the one who started to shape the story’s arc over the seasons. Linney’s work on the show was deceptively layered, each layer of ambition rearing its ugly head one episode at a time. She was at her magnetic, vulpine and devious best when Wendy was taking down her rivals, be it Darlene or her father, with nothing but mere words and a disarming Midwestern smile.

When we first met Marty, he had shut himself off, his wife was cheating on him, his kids barely spoke to him, and his business partner had stolen money from the cartel. The strength of Bateman’s performance stemmed from Marty’s even-tempered pragmatism. His passivity provided the show an emotional anchor. Even when tension reached a boiling point, we knew Marty would keep a cool head. At one point this season, he does lose his cool, as the Byrdes yield to road rage, beating up a fellow motorist. In a comical turn of events, the children bail their parents out.

Ghosts from the past return in the final chapter. On Ruth’s convincing, Rachel Garrison (Jordana Spiro), the once Blue Cat Lodge owner whose life was ruined by the Byrdes, decides to come back home to run the casino as partners. Ruth is haunted by the ghost of Wyatt, imagining the life they could have had together. Watching the Byrdes prepare to return to Chicago, she remarks, “They’re building a whole life that should be ours.” Wendy contends with disruptions from a ghost from her own past: her father, who looks to gain custody of his grandchildren, not to take them away from all the dangers they have been put through, but to spite his daughter. She becomes so distraught she checks in to a mental health care centre, the same one Ben was committed to before his death.

Ben’s death causes a rift within the family. Their son Jonah (Skylar Gaertner) is so shocked by the lengths his mother will go to keep them together, he moves into a motel, where he launders money for Ruth and Darlene. If Jonah takes after his dad, Charlotte takes after her mother, as evidenced in a scene where she reveals to Erin Pierce (Madison Thompson), the daughter of the cartel lawyer Helen Pierce (Janet McTeer) that her mother is dead, consoling her while threatening her to stop looking for answers at the same time. That the Byrde children survived till the end is a miracle. That Marty and Wendy’s marriage survived adultery, the lies they told each other and themselves, the endless disagreements, the marriage counselling sessions with paid-off therapists, and every complication that came with their job — is a miracle in itself.

Before they can start their lives anew in Chicago as a law-abiding family, all the misdeeds do catch up to them. On being caught with their hands in the cookie jar by the PI investigating Ben’s death, their instinct is to pay him off. The PI refuses. “You don’t get to win,” he says. “You don’t get to be the Kochs or the Kennedys or whatever fucking royalty you people think you are. World doesn’t work like that.” Wendy asks rhetorically: “Since when?” Then comes the final moment, a culmination of the overarching story that has been running for four seasons, closes on an image of Marty and Wendy made all the more haunting by a proud smile leaking out as their son endeavours to protect the family. From start to finish, it has always been about the family. Ozark doesn’t take The Sopranos’ route of ambiguity or Breaking Bad’s finality, offering a decided mix of both.

The world of Ozark is a world of familial and institutional dysfunction. A world where a family-run pharmaceutical company buys heroin from the cartel to cut costs in exchange for donations to a political foundation. A world where the FBI want a cartel to continue its business for five more years so it can use the cash seizures to fill up its vault. A world where the machinations of the rich and the powerful only grew more revolting. A world where the family that launders together stays together. In such a world, it’s no surprise the Byrdes don’t exactly get their comeuppance.

All four seasons of Ozark are now streaming on Netflix.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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