In search of relevance; caught in ’90s time warp – Winnipeg Free Press

Presumed Innocent (a miniseries streaming on Apple TV+) centers on Rusty Sabich (Jake Gyllenhaal), a high-flying prosecutor who delivers lavish speeches in court about truth and justice. When his colleague Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve) is brutally murdered, Rusty is put on the case—at least until it’s revealed that Rusty, who is married with two children, was having an obsessive sexual relationship with the victim.

When Rusty himself is charged with the crime, his career and his family – and perhaps even these speeches about truth and justice – will be upended.

Presumed innocent began in 1987 as a best-selling novel by Scott Turow.

It was later adapted into a film in 1990. Directed by Alan Pakula and starring a shaved-headed Harrison Ford, the film was a typically sexy ’90s legal thriller, meaning big shoulder pads, a twist ending, and lots of weird gender dynamics.

At a time when workplaces were changing, Hollywood responded with a wave of “male paranoia” films, including movies like Fatal attraction And DisclosureIn this genre, professional women are often portrayed as man-eating demons in business suits, sleeping around in the corner office, destroying solid suburban marriages.

In the 1990 film, Carolyn, played by Greta Scacchi, is an ambitious and sexually voracious woman. After news of her murder breaks, one of her colleagues remarks that her death is a waste. “Such a hot woman,” he says, adding, almost as an afterthought, “And a hell of a lawyer.”

David E. Kelley, the man behind the current eight-episode reboot, has made it clear that he intends to update the source material. Turow was reportedly told directly that the new adaptation would deviate from the novel.

As a result, the Chicago-set story benefits from a more diverse cast. There are more female characters—not just a silent, long-suffering wife and a ruthless single woman—and they have more to do and say. No one uses the word “broad.”

The new series is dressed as it should be: smart, adult, complicated and contemporary. Like all Kelley productions, it is well-crafted and features a top-tier cast, including Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga as Barbara Sabich. But the ’90s clichés seem to be hiding beneath the 2024 exterior, and the result is a series that feels fatally divided.

Kelley’s heyday came in the ’90s. He was the king of television during that decade, creating cutting-edge appointment shows like Ally McBealHe was a showrunner at a time when no one talked about showrunners. (Remember, this was beforeThe Sopranos(before prestige television, before the streaming wars.) A former lawyer, he worked on network legal series like Los Angeles Law And Boston Legal.

Adapting to the streaming age, he specialized in stories of very rich, very unhappy women, often with a murder case thrown in (Big Little Lies, Deconstruction, Anatomy of a Scandal).

But lately, he seems to be in a nostalgic mode. Another of Kelley’s recent projects, the Netflix drama A whole manis based on a novel by Tom Wolfe, a source with a totally 90s vibe that never makes the leap to the 21st century.

Presumed innocent also finds itself torn between two eras. The updated characters talk a lot more about their feelings, for example. But does the audience really learn anything new?

In 1990, Harrison Ford gave a laconic and emotionally restrained performance as Rusty. Gyllenhaal brings out more, and his portrayal of the character is at times sympathetic, at times sweaty, shouty, angry, arrogant, and drenched in self-pity.

Rusty’s boss, Raymond Horgan (Bill Camp), who later becomes his lawyer, suggests that while Rusty might attribute his behavior to “complexity”—the familiar defense of TV’s “difficult men”—some people might simply say he’s a “pig.”

It’s a problem Kelley seems to recognize, in a 2024 sort of way, but he’s not quite ready to confront it.

Likewise, women are more visible, but are their characters becoming more rounded? Barbara announces to Rusty—and to us—that she is not “tragically dependent.” But despite Negga’s solid work, Barbara can’t shake the initial association with “long-suffering wife” tropes.

Carolyn, seen only in flashbacks of other characters and in increasingly gratuitous crime scene photos of her bloodied, brutalized, and bound body, has perhaps even less of a presence than her 1990 predecessor. This seems like a particularly glaring shortcoming, especially considering the new series’ extended runtime.

“I understand your thirst for relevance,” a character says at one point, using the phrase as a mean provocation. Kelley displays his own thirst for relevance, trying to appear realistic and current in dealing with gender issues, workplace dynamics, and HR nightmares.

But it fails to escape the ’90s plot structure. As we head toward the ending, which was famously shocking in the original film, it will be interesting to see how Kelley handles what has become an unlikely and conflicting tangle of regressive and progressive impulses.

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Alison Gillmor
Writer

After studying at the University of Winnipeg and then York University in Toronto, Alison Gillmor had plans to become an art historian. She finally caught the journalism bug when she started working as a visual arts critic at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.

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