Amazon ties way too hard at ‘The Lake’
Prime Video asks viewers to plunge into “The Lake,” a melodrama from Canada. Contrivances, it has a few.
Justin (Jordan Gavaris) and his biological daughter, Billie (Madison Shamoun), have arranged to rent a lakeside cottage for the summer, so they can “bond.” Justin, a gay character dripping with stereotypical quirks, conceived Billie when he was in high school. He gave her up for adoption because, while he may have still been in the closet, he knew he wasn’t exactly “dad” material.
We first meet Billie outside of a rustic convenience store, complaining on the phone that she’s going to be missing, well EVERYTHING, while stuck in the sticks with a birth dad she barely knows. She’s also given to dropping rhetorical screeds about the planet and the patriarchy into the most casual conversations. As a biracial teen, she’s also painfully and vocally aware of just how uncomfortably Caucasian a rural Canadian lake resort can be.
Cut to Justin, buying snacks for their trip and melting in front of the hot straight guy manning the checkout counter. He buys a new bag of junk food every time he says something inappropriate and leaves looking like a snack-laden Santa Claus.
It seems Justin has just broken up with a longtime lover and is willing and eager to “share” and whine in all the worst ways. And by “worst” I mean conducting inappropriate and uncomfortable discussions about sexual preferences and venereal diseases with complete strangers.
To recap, we haven’t gotten to their rental yet, and I want “The Lake” to become one of those “Cabin by the Lake” Judd Nelson movies just so I can watch these characters die.
Sadly, this is intended as a “comedy,” so there’s a whole season of treading water.
Later, Justin teaches Billie to paddle a canoe, and they happen upon the old family lakeside mansion. Justin thought it had been sold to strangers and lost forever, but it was inherited by Justin’s estranged stepsister, Maisy-May (Julia Stiles), whose hot husband and even studlier son provide eye candy for Justin and Billie. So, they all have “issues” and a whole summer of lakeside shenanigans to work them out.
It’s no exaggeration to say that every single line of dialogue uttered by the major characters is laced with multiple pop-culture references or politically charged innuendo. Minor characters look on in amazement or tell the speakers how clever or “different” they are. I’m afraid we have Tina Fey (“Mean Girls,” “30 Rock”) to blame for this brand of dialogue. Few of the conversations resemble human interaction.
› Prime Video also streams the movie adaptation of the popular YA novel “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” by Jenny Han, author of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” adapted into a Netflix franchise.