When Scott Turow’s hit legal thriller Presumed innocent was first adapted for the screen by Alan Pakula in 1990, the film seemed to be part of a Hollywood trend catering to white male paranoia. Michael Douglas was the primary avatar of this school of pop culture projection: in the years before and after, he was stalked by a one-night stand at Fatal attractionsexually harassed by his boss Disclosurethreatened by a sexy bisexual serial killer Primary instinct, and harassed by various racial minorities in a homicidal rampage in To fall. by Pakula Presumed innocent, starring the less abrasive Harrison Ford was a more prestigious and tasteful artifact of its era, but its premise remains largely that of a specific historical moment. This makes David E. Kelley’s decision to create a new adaptation of the novel for Apple TV+ a mystery in itself.
Certainly, both the novel and Pakula’s adaptation were hits for a reason. As in most of Turow’s thrillers, the plot works like a Swiss watch, here forming a pair of ruthless pincers closing in on Rusty Sabich (played in the new adaptation by Jake Gyllenhaal), an Illinois prosecutor whose colleague Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve) is found murdered and grotesquely tied up in her home. Rusty’s boss, prosecutor Ray Horgan (Bill Camp), insists that Rusty take on the case. Horgan faces an electoral challenger in Nico Della Guardia (OT Fagbenle), another prosecutor, and he needs the best lawyer in his office to demonstrate that the prosecutor did not allow the crime to devastate even his own staff. Rusty resists at first, but the alternative, Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard), doesn’t have the chops: “I’m better than Tommy,” Gyllenhaal’s Rusty declares flatly at a staff meeting, dangerously oblivious to the resentment which smolders behind Molto’s eyes.
The problem with this plan is that Rusty had an affair with Carolyn that allegedly ended months earlier, and Rusty’s wife, Barbara (Ruth Negga), accuses him of still being in love with her. When Horgan loses the election, Della Guardia and Molto go after Rusty, who called and texted Carolyn obsessively shortly before her death. The drama culminates in court when Rusty is put on trial for murder.
Law offices and courtrooms always seemed to be Kelley’s playground, as did Rusty’s comfortable upper-middle-class home, with its swimming pool and columned porch. The longer runtime of the series allows Kelley to bring in more red herrings and twists than the film could accommodate. And the subtext of the story has been updated. The casting is more diverse. It’s at least acknowledged that Rusty and Carolyn’s affair is a human resources nightmare. (In the 1990 film, Horgan responds to Carolyn’s death by saying, “What a waste, a hot woman like that. And a hell of a lawyer.”) Barbara – essentially a long-suffering housewife in the film – is granted a three-dimensional overview. identity, complete with a job at an art gallery that she loses when the media circus surrounding her husband’s arrest attracts too much negative attention, a gentle flirtation with a handsome bartender, and allusions to the unlived life that she sacrificed to her husband and two children.
But you have to ask yourself why she did it. Apple TV+ Presumed innocent presents Rusty’s life as a gray, hushed realm, its colors washed out by the quiet comforts of suburbia and the petty power struggles of the workplace. The novel’s clever conceit — subjecting a prosecutor to the indignities, from home searches to intrusive interrogations about his sex life, that he once inflicted on defendants — makes Gyllenhaal’s Rusty so waxy that he seems almost embalmed. He’s in purgatory, and the few times he lashes out, as well as the slow trickle of unflattering revelations about his relationship with Carolyn, encourage the viewer to consider the possibility that Rusty is guilty. Well he East guilty of so many things, whether he killed Carolyn or not. Perhaps the worst of Rusty’s torments is that he knows they are at least partly deserved.
This gives Kelley Presumed innocent a penitential look. In Turow’s book and Pakula’s film, Carolyn is a scheming climber, who sleeps with a series of powerful men to advance her career. She abandons Rusty as soon as she realizes that he won’t be of much use to her in that department. The 1980s and 1990s boom in glossy Hollywood films worrying about women’s “incursion” into professional workplaces and the threat that they might use their sexual power against their male colleagues did not not aged well, to say the least, but it had the advantage of great melodrama. In the film version, Carolyn is played by the inhumanly exquisite Greta Scacchi, equipped with shoulder pads that would make a linebacker proud. In the series, the more relevant Reinsve (fresh from her international breakthrough in The worst person in the world) plays a Carolyn who wins Rusty’s heart through her sensitivity by questioning an abused little girl.
Fagbenle and Sarsgaard step in to add some spice to these proceedings, serving as interim villains, until the murderer is discovered. Fagbenle’s Della Guardia is a delightfully adept political animal with a silky voice and deadpan demeanor. Sarsgaard is even more fun to watch and hate as the second rater who finally gets the chance to nail the guy who has always overshadowed him. His sleepy smirk as he maneuvers Rusty into his self-made traps is a mustache-twirl for our times. (In truth, we see more demonstrations of Molto’s legal skills in this series than Rusty’s.) Apparently, Presumed innocent is a murder mystery, but it feels most vivid when it focuses on office politics — or, really, any time Fagbenle and Sarsgaard are on screen.
Then there’s the ending, which more or less affirms the aforementioned male paranoia as Presumed innocentThis is the theme of the novel and the film. The final episode hasn’t been made available to critics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the identity of the killer had been changed. The series has already made significant changes, having Horgan act as Rusty’s defense attorney in place of Sandy Stern, a recurring character in many of Turow’s novels. Given how much the world itself has changed since 1990, rethinking that infamous final twist might just be the most welcome thing ever. TO DO.