Jake Gyllenhaal, center, stars as Rusty in the Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent. Gyllenhaal follows Harrison Ford, who performed in the role in the 1990 film adaptation of the Scott Turow novel.Michael Becker/The Associated Press
There are at least a couple reasons why a movie like 1990′s Presumed Innocent, starring Harrison Ford as a crown prosecutor put on trial for the murder of his colleague (and lover), wouldn’t be made today.
First off, Hollywood just doesn’t make slick mid-budget courtroom dramas or seductive domestic thrillers for the big screen like they used to. That kind of adult skewing fare is almost exclusively the territory of streaming.
That’s why you’ll find the smart and absorbing new take on Presumed Innocent, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as the accused flailing before a jury and his family, stretching its legs in episodic form on Apple TV+, where it premiered on June 12.
The older Presumed Innocent, adapted from Scott Turow’s novel, would get raked over the coals today for its treatment of women.
In that film, Greta Scaachi, who last year spoke about her eighties stardom limiting her to playing male fantasies, is the victim, Carolyn Polhemus. She’s a cunning and opportunistic prosecutor who slept with half the office, including Ford’s Rusty Sabich, to get ahead, and ends up dead. Bonnie Bedelia, who is perhaps most famous for playing Holly Gennaro in Die Hard, is also present as Rusty’s wife, Barbara – once again playing a woman waiting for her wayward husband to find his way back to the coop.
The otherwise elegant and gripping thriller, from All the President’s Men and Klute director Alan J. Pakula, seemed to be making a bold point in practice. His movie is about a patriarchal world that limits women to either play whore or docile wife – at the home, office or box office – and how those limitations metastasize into monstrous violence. It’s a difficult argument to stomach, as the movie itself refuses to imagine women beyond those tropes.
Presumed Innocent 2.0 isn’t guilty of the same. It’s safer, and, as a result, not quite as provocative. It ditches the gross self-implicating clichés from the earlier work, while making room for more women to be three-dimensional, especially Barbara, who is filled in by Ruth Negga with superhuman depth.
The improvements to this round of whodunit are perhaps predictable, since the series is created by David E. Kelley who – like his late Big Little Lies collaborator director, Jean-Marc Vallee – is among the few men in the business crafting compelling stories around women.
Things get going when a scene of calm domesticity is shattered by a phone call. Carolyn’s body is found bloodied and hogtied, a sight in shocking full display when Rusty rushes over in a panic to the scene. As in the original, Rusty is assigned to the case by his boss, Raymond (Bill Camp, excellent), a district attorney who is up for re-election and wants to see swift justice to an explosive case compromising his campaign.
Ruth Negga lends a superhuman depth to the role of Barbara in Presumed Innocent.The Associated Press
He’s not the only one here operating with selfish motives. Rusty immediately looks for suspects among the men Carolyn has put behind bars, while also tucking away incriminating evidence of his own relationship with her.
Carolyn, who is played by Renate Reinsve, remains barely sketched, a victim of sexual violence who we mostly learn about through case files and haunting flashbacks, as in the original. Reinsve, the star of The Worst Person in the World, is a bit wasted in the role.
Gyllenhaal’s Rusty, on the other hand, is an improvement. He’s got that rascally Ford charm but not the movie-star gravitas, which actually makes him far more believable as a protagonist who maybe shouldn’t be believed. Gyllenhaal’s gift is shifting rapidly between cocky confidence, squirrelly panic and bug-eyed maniacal, a better fit for a character who does a terrible job of convincing us, and the people around him, that he’s innocent.
He’s actually not. The eight-part series, of which seven episodes were provided for review, is at its best when cataloguing how cruelly narcissistic, careless and even misogynistic Rusty can be, and how much it pains Negga’s Barbara, and his children, to have to stand by him and be judged by their peers.
The movie is essentially about two trials. There’s the one in court, with Rusty facing off against a weaselly prosecutor (Gyllenhaal’s regular collaborator and brother-in-law, Peter Sarsgaard) who is eager to hang a noose around him, figuratively speaking. Like the previous movie, this is where pulpy and lurid twists meet the authenticity in Turow’s writing, which captures the performativity in the justice system.
We know that criminal lawyers are supposed to be measured, calm and rational when trying cases, not overcome by romantic and sexual obsessions or personal vendettas, as is the case when Presumed Innocent borders on soap opera. But we also know that biases, political agendas and collusion play a role in the justice system that a limited series doesn’t have the room to cover.
The other trial is at home, where Rusty has to somehow convince his family he deserves their affection. Making the room for these scenes of domestic turbulence, and Barbara’s own attempts to rationalize and find strength and solace elsewhere, is all the justification we need for Presumed Innocent’s shift from feature film to series.
And while making that shift, enough has been shuffled and deepened that I can’t say that I know beyond a reasonable doubt how things will end.
New episodes each Wednesday on Apple TV+.