Scott Turow’s first novel, the 1987 best seller “Presumed Innocent,” is a clever murder mystery and courtroom drama with an 11th-hour twist. Before that denouement, it throws out red herrings to distract us, paralleling the strategy of its protagonist, Rusty Sabich, a prosecutor accused of killing the female colleague with whom he was having an affair. The 1990 film adaptation starring Harrison Ford necessarily condensed Turow’s plot but stayed true to its outlines and to the identity of the killer, a closely guarded secret through most of the story.
It’s possible that the new “Presumed Innocent,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+ and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Sabich, ends up at the same place, with the same killer. But after watching seven of its eight episodes, I didn’t really care. The claustrophobic atmosphere, the emphasis on psychology and trite family drama over well-made mystery and, especially, the crescendoing melodrama that makes a mockery of Turow’s courtroom credibility (even though he is credited as a co-executive producer) had done me in.
The book is narrated in the first person by Sabich, and its most striking stylistic feature is his continual, detailed analyses of his professional and personal lives. Those passages are not there just for their own sake — Turow uses them to ground us in the milieus and the motivations of the courtroom and the prosecutors’ office. He cares about the inner life of Sabich, but he cares just as much about providing the framework for a page-turning mystery.
Onscreen, the emphases have been different. Alan J. Pakula’s film was a chilly affair, elegantly assembled (with cinematography by the great Gordon Willis) but lacking the juice of a real thriller. It was more interested in the ethical and philosophical ramifications of Sabich’s situation, favoring judgment over action. (It was fun to watch once the case got into the courtroom, though, thanks to the performances of Raul Julia and Paul Winfield as defense lawyer and judge.)
David E. Kelley, the veteran television writer who created the “Presumed Innocent” series, has the opposite temperament from Pakula — he’s all about the juice. He’s a master of taking material with a lurid or sensational edge and slickly packaging it for a mainstream TV audience. When he’s in his relaxed mode, on “The Lincoln Lawyer” for Netflix or the risibly pulpy “Big Sky” for ABC, the results can be entertaining, summoning distant memories of his days as chief writer on “L.A. Law.”
When he takes things more seriously, though, he gets in trouble (though it doesn’t necessarily affect his success, as “Big Little Lies” demonstrated). Like Pakula, he makes “Presumed Innocent” more about Sabich than about the presumably less interesting question of whether Sabich is guilty of murder. But all he has to offer are tortured psychology and transgression, presented slickly and repetitively, with head-scratching surprises in place of new ideas. Meant to be provocative, it’s just wearying.
Given five and a half hours to play with, Kelley restores plot points that were cut from the movie and adds his own, some of which almost immediately change the basic terms of Turow’s mystery plot. (A major turning point involving tubal ligation is now moot.) He ups the frequency and steaminess of the flashback sex scenes between Sabich and the victim, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve), while nearly eliminating evidence of either her competence or her ambition, which are essential to the plot.
And when the case goes to court, Kelley’s penchant for loony melodrama kicks in, as bodies drop and decisions are made that violate all the rules of sensible procedure that we’ve learned from more sober legal dramas. (We should stipulate that Kelley, a former lawyer, has sensationalized courtroom action for the last 40 years across multiple shows.)
While Polhemus doesn’t come into focus as much more than a sex object, the real victims in this “Presumed Innocent” are the performers. In contrast to Ford’s closed-in, monochromatic performance in the film, where Sabich seemed dumbfounded to be accused of murder, Gyllenhaal is sweaty, jumpy and over the top, playing a Sabich who seems alternately terrified and royally offended, swinging between anguished apologies and violent outbursts.
The wonderful actress Ruth Negga plays Sabich’s nobly, glumly suffering wife, Barbara, about as well as anyone could (as the character is written, Negga can’t match the delicacy of Bonnie Bedelia’s performance in the film), while Peter Sarsgaard struggles to make something more than a cartoon out of Sabich’s nemesis, the epically insecure prosecutor Tommy Molto. Bill Camp gives some life to the more straightforward role of Ray Horgan, Sabich’s boss and mentor, and O-T Fagbenle has a shifty, oddly engaging quality as Ray’s rival in the prosecutors’ office.
Published and first adapted nearly four decades ago, “Presumed Innocent” has a problem it shares with other stories from the late 1980s: It is based on the notion of a predatory, promiscuous woman who threatens society by seducing a solid suburban man and thereby ends up dead.
This is another reason, beyond Kelley’s dramatic instincts, that the new series doesn’t focus in a satisfying way on the mystery at its heart. In 2024, a story like this has to be — or at least is very likely to be — an allegory for what’s known as cancel culture. Gyllenhaal’s Sabich, his life suddenly turned upside down by an accusation, is also suddenly denigrated for his hubris: “You’re Rusty Sabich, and you can do whatever you want”; “Let’s send you to a doctor and get a diagnosis, but my fear is that it will just come back pig.” His desperation is less about proving his innocence than it is about proving his moral bona fides. The revelation of who killed Carolyn Polhemus, if and when it comes, feels as if it will be just a piece of accounting.
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