Jake Gyllenhaal’s New Show Updates a ’90s Hit—and Its Conservative Subtext
When Scott Turow’s bestselling legal thriller Presumed Innocent was first adapted for the screen by Alan Pakula in 1990, the movie felt like part of a Hollywood trend catering to white male paranoia. Michael Douglas was the chief avatar of this school of pop culture projection: In the years before and after, he was stalked by a one-night stand in Fatal Attraction, sexually harassed by his female boss in Disclosure, menaced by a sexy bisexual serial killer in Basic Instinct, and hassled by assorted racial minorities into a homicidal rampage in Falling Down. Pakula’s Presumed Innocent, starring the less abrasive Harrison Ford, was a more prestigious and tasteful artifact of its time, but its premise remains very much of a specific historical moment. That makes David E. Kelley’s decision to create a new adaptation of the novel for Apple TV+ something of a mystery in its own right.
Granted, the novel and Pakula’s adaptation were both hits for a reason. As with most of Turow’s thrillers, the plot operates like a Swiss watch, in this case forming a pair of merciless pincers closing in on Rusty Sabich (played in the new adaptation by Jake Gyllenhaal), an Illinois prosecutor whose co-worker Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve) is found murdered and grotesquely hog-tied in her home. Rusty’s boss, District Attorney Ray Horgan (Bill Camp), insists that Rusty work the case. Horgan faces an election challenger in Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle), another prosecutor, and he needs the best lawyer in his office to demonstrate that the DA hasn’t allowed crime to devastate even his own staff. Rusty initially resists, but the alternative, Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard), doesn’t have the chops—“I’m better than Tommy,” Gyllenhaal’s Rusty states flatly in a staff meeting, dangerously oblivious to the resentment stewing behind Molto’s eyes.
The problem with this plan is that Rusty had an affair with Carolyn that supposedly 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 is found to have telephoned and texted Carolyn obsessively shortly before her death. The drama culminates in court as Rusty is tried for murder.
Law firms and courtrooms have always felt like Kelley’s home turf, as does Rusty’s comfortable upper-middle-class home with its swimming pool and column-framed front porch. The longer running time of the series allows Kelley to bring more red herrings and plot twists into play than the movie could accommodate. And the story’s subtext has been updated. The cast 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 sexy broad like that. And a helluva lawyer.”) Barbara—essentially a long-suffering homemaker in the film—is granted a three-dimensional identity, complete with a job in an art gallery that she loses when the media circus surrounding her husband’s arrest attracts too much negative attention, a sweet flirtation with a handsome bartender, and allusions to the unlived life she sacrificed to her husband and two children.
You have to wonder why she did, though. The Apple TV+ Presumed Innocent presents Rusty’s life as a hushed, gray realm, its colors leached away by the sedate comforts of suburbia and the petty power struggles of the workplace. The novel’s smart conceit—subjecting a prosecutor to the indignities, from home searches to intrusive questioning about his sex life, he once inflicted on defendants—renders Gyllenhaal’s Rusty so waxen he looks almost embalmed. He’s in purgatory, and the handful of times he lashes out against his fate, along with the slow trickle of unflattering revelations about his relationship with Carolyn, encourage the viewer to consider the possibility that Rusty might be guilty. Well, he is guilty, of so many things, whether or not he killed Carolyn. Perhaps the worst part of Rusty’s torments is that he knows they are at least somewhat deserved.
This gives Kelley’s Presumed Innocent a penitential air. In Turow’s book and Pakula’s film, Carolyn is a scheming climber, sleeping with a string of powerful men to advance her career. She dumps Rusty as soon as she realizes that he won’t be much use to her in that department. The 1980s and ’90s boom in glossy Hollywood movies fretting over the “incursion” of women into professional workplaces and the threat that they might use sexual power against their male colleagues has not aged well, to say the least, but it did have the advantage of high melodrama. In the movie version, Carolyn is played by the inhumanly exquisite Greta Scacchi, kitted out in shoulder pads that would do a linebacker proud. In the series, the more relatable Reinsve (fresh off her international breakout in The Worst Person in the World) plays a Carolyn who wins Rusty’s heart with her sensitivity in questioning a little girl who has been abused.
Stepping in to provide a little zest to these proceedings are Fagbenle and Sarsgaard, serving as villains pro tem, until the murderer is discovered. Fagbenle’s Della Guardia is a deliciously slick political animal with a silken voice and languid deadpan. Sarsgaard is even more fun to watch and hate as a second-rater finally getting his chance to nail the guy who has always overshadowed him. His sleepy smirk as he maneuvers Rusty into traps of his own making is mustache-twirling for our time. (In truth, we see more demonstrations of Molto’s lawyerly skills in this series than Rusty’s.) Ostensibly, Presumed Innocent is a murder mystery, but it feels most lively when it focuses on office politics—or, really, anytime Fagbenle and Sarsgaard are on screen.
Then there’s the ending, which more or less affirmed the aforementioned male paranoia as Presumed Innocent’s theme in both novel and film. The final episode was not made available to critics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the killer’s identity has been changed. The series has already made significant alterations, by having Horgan act as Rusty’s defense counsel instead of Sandy Stern, a character who recurs 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 it could do.
