Julia Garner Gave the Best Performance of the 2022 in ‘Ozark’

A truly great performance is a hard thing to accomplish. TV is littered with interesting characters, fictional people bolstered by sharp writing, superb costume design, and convenient plot devices specifically engineered to make us fall in love with them. But great performances have always required more. They demand their actors to go beyond what’s written on the page or even what’s on the screen to create a performance that’s somehow more than the sum of its excellent parts. And no actor exemplified that high caliber better than Julia Garner in Ozark‘s final season.

From the first moment Ruth Langmore stormed on screen, she was a force. A tiny, murderous young woman who could confidently sell the line “I don’t know shit about fuck” — what wasn’t to love? But as Ozark evolved as a series, so too did Garner’s portrayal of Ruth evolve with it.

In Season 2, we were privy to Ruth’s secret insecurities thanks to Cade Langmore (Trevor Long), the demanding father whose approval she could never win. Season 3 brought with it a silver lining for our fiery money launderer. Ben (Tom Pelphrey) wore down her tough exterior, and as Ruth fell in love, we witnessed a softer side to this hardass. Garner portrayed these drastic characters changes with grace. Even when Ruth was at her sappiest or her most neurotic, she was always recognizable. But it was only through Ruth’s grief that Garner was able to deliver a performance that was a cut above this frankly excellent show.

Ruth’s sorrow over Wyatt’s (Charlie Tahan) death didn’t feel merely authentic. It felt guttural, nearly god-like in the ancient Greek sense of the word. It was an inevitable proclamation of mutual destruction, the roar you hear at the beginning of an avalanche. “Sanctified” ended with every muscle in Ruth’s slight frame vibrating as she screamed in Marty’s (Jason Bateman) face, “If you wanna stop me, then you’re gonna have to fucking kill me!” It’s a moment that stands not only as one of the best-performed moments of the year, but also as possibly one of the all-time best screamed lines of all time.

But Ruth and Garner didn’t stop there. Throughout “The Cousin of Death”, Ruth wallowed, drifting around the streets of Chicago desperate to end the man who had killed her cousin. It was an episode that could have easily been defined by anger or grief — two emotions that this character and actor know well. Instead, Garner infused Ruth’s hunt with the far more difficult to capture ennui. Even as Ruth pulled the trigger on the gun that would end Javi’s (Alfonso Herrera) life and eventually hers, she was defined by listlessness. No longer bound to life in any meaningful way, Ruth didn’t seem to fully understand why she had to kill Javi. But she had to do it.

In fact, in an inspired choice for this brutal show, Ruth only becomes herself again in Ozark‘s final moments. In “A Hard Way to Go”, the Byrdes finally break down, selling out Ruth for their family’s safety. In the episodes prior to this finale, Ruth was a shell of herself, someone who half-heartedly agreed to wild plans and who was prone to bouts of sentimentality. But as Camila (Verónica Falcón) raised her gun to end one final life, the Ruth we fell in love with reemerged. Her final words? “Well? Are you gonna fucking do this shit or what?” In her last moments Ruth, foul-mouthed as ever, greeted death as an old friend. Isn’t that glorious?

Of course, Garner’s stellar performance never existed in a vacuum. Ruth would have never felt so dynamic if she wasn’t in constant contrast to the best straight-edge everyman Hollywood has to offer, Jason Bateman. Likewise, her hare-brained schemes and endless betrayals would have seemed far more sinister without Laura Linney’s underrated portrayal of the effortlessly manipulative Wendy. Ozark was always an ensemble drama at its core, and it was a strong one at that. Still, it was Garner who kept us screaming from the edge of our seats.

Ruth Langmore became more than just a character on a TV show. She was a walking meme as well as a poster child for the bizarre shapes grief takes. By its end she became a cautionary tale, another person lost due to the whims and mistakes of the wealthy. It takes a lot to elevate a performance from its show, especially when the show in question is as consistently great and award-winning as this one. But in Ozark’s final season, that’s exactly what Julia Garner did.