Let's Talk About 'Presumed Innocent's' Shocking, Silly Finale
This article discusses the Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent's Season 1 finale, as well as the endings of the film Presumed Innocent and several series by the show's creator, David E. Kelley.
I'll say this much about the season finale of Presumed Innocent, a shoddily scripted, excessively long crime drama that frustrated and disappointed me from beginning to end: the final twist came as a genuine surprise. When Jake Gyllenhaal's freshly acquitted prosecutor Rusty Sabich confronted his loyal wife, Ruth Negga's Barbara, in the family's garage, they and creator David E. Kelley really had me believing that she was the one who murdered Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve). I wasn't happy about it; even if the jealous-wife reveal hadn't echoed the conclusion of Scott Turow's original novel and the 1990 movie adaptation, a woman who is so timid about the prospect of so much as cheating on her adulterous husband probably is not capable of homicide. But I believed it, because my expectations of Presumed Innocent were already so low.
Then, as Rusty details why and how he'd staged the murder scene to protect Barbara, who he's always assumed was the killer, their daughter Jaden (Chase Infiniti) steps into the garage. First she confesses to planting the fireplace poker in Tommy Molto's (Peter Sarsgaard) kitchen. (In retrospect, the futile gesture of leaving the jerky prosecutor a murder weapon, complete with a note that says "go f-ck yourself," does feel authentically adolescent.) Then it all comes out—how Jaden went to Carolyn's house to confront her about her relationship with Rusty, how Carolyn told Jaden she was pregnant with Rusty's child, how Jaden flew into a rage, beat Carolyn to death with the poker, and woke up the next morning convinced that the whole awful night had been a dream.
It's a truly surprising ending. But that doesn't mean it's a satisfying one. Making Jaden the guilty party feels like a contrivance designed to shock viewers and subvert our expectations without bothering to convince us that this character had it in her to kill her father's lover. (I mean, how absurd was that flashback of Jaden attacking Carolyn?) Sure, there were a few clues in previous episodes. In one scene, Jaden demanded to know what evidence Tommy and the DA, Nico della Guardia (O-T Fagbenle), had against Rusty. She eavesdropped on her parents confronting her red-herring brother, Kyle (Kingston Rumi Southwick), about photographic evidence that he, too, was lurking near Carolyn's house on the night of the murder. But what teen wouldn't be extra vigilant with her dad on trial for murder? Also, why would the killer ask her mom, as Jaden does in Episode 5: "Did he do this?"
The biggest hint—really the only hint—that Jaden was harboring guilt or darkness is a conversation she has with Rusty in the season's sixth episode. Jaden explains to her father the concept of "disassociation," which she learned about in psychology class, i.e., "how the brain can protect people from themselves" after traumatic incidents: "If they do something that they can't reconcile with what they perceive themselves to be, it can cause a disassociation." At the time, it seems as though Jaden is trying to feel out whether Rusty disassociated from his memories of killing Carolyn. Now we know that she was testing whether he could empathize with her predicament.
But does this one scene really explain everything, in a show where every character is a suspect but no one, with the partial exception of Rusty, is particularly fleshed out? Despite piling on pathos, the episodes leading up to the finale didn’t do much to rule out suspects; if anything, they expanded the field. Tommy seemed a strong, if overly obvious possibility, though the fireplace-poker plant complicated that notion. Something certainly felt amiss with Carolyn’s angry teenage son, Michael (Tate Birchmore), and bitter ex-husband, Dalton (Matthew Alan)—who flipped out at the prosecutors when he learned that Rusty would be cross-examining Michael. And as the finale approached, fan theories ran truly wild, with internet sleuths examining everyone from Rusty’s fellow prosecutor Eugenia (Virginia Kull) to his friend and lawyer, former DA Raymond (Bill Camp).
Considering how devoted the series was to fixing the representational missteps of its predecessors, it didn't seem likely—until, in the Sabiches' garage, it briefly did—that Barbara would turn out to be the guilty party. Turow's Presumed Innocent and, to an even greater extent, the largely faithful film adaptation starring Harrison Ford told a more gripping story than Kelley’s drawn-out show but was also a deeply misogynistic piece of work. A product of the same ’80s backlash against second-wave feminism that produced erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Body Heat, the movie turned out to be a cautionary tale about female desire. Determined to sleep her way to the top, its Carolyn (Greta Scacchi), an ambitious homewrecker femme fatale, was all but blamed for her own murder.
In a final twist, the only other major female character in the movie, Rusty’s wife Barbara (Bonnie Bedelia)—whose role is limited for almost all of its 127-minute runtime to standing meekly by her man—is revealed to be Carolyn’s killer. (Years later, NPR’s Linda Holmes dubbed an outcome in which a remarkably quiet, passive whodunit character played by a recognizable actor turns out to be the guilty party “the Bonnie Bedelia rule.”) When we discover she's the culprit, it’s in a monologue that paints Barbara as both a pathetic woman, entirely dependent on her marriage, and a psychopath willing to go to the most diabolical lengths to keep Rusty by her side.
Going into the finale, I was more convinced that Rusty would end up being guilty as charged. Of course, “the husband did it” is just as worn a murder-mystery cliché as the jealous wife. But it’s one of which Kelley is particularly fond. His HBO drama The Undoing follows Nicole Kidman as a psychologist—a psychologist!—who simply cannot get it through her head, despite mounting evidence of his guilt, that her charismatic, pediatric-oncologist husband (Hugh Grant) murdered his mistress (Matilda De Angelis). Anatomy of a Scandal, on Netflix, slots Sienna Miller into the Kidman role, though this time the charismatic husband is a Tory MP (Rupert Friend) and the crime for which he’s on trial is the rape of an aide (Naomi Scott) who was, yes, his mistress. Alexander Skarsg?rd’s Perry Wright may be the victim, not the killer, in Big Little Lies, but, as an abusive husband and sexual predator, he’s a rotten-enough person that his death is framed as just deserts.
All of the above series were adapted from novels written by women, which makes it tempting to interpret their anti-male conclusions as pro-feminist statements. But particularly in the cases of The Undoing and Anatomy of a Scandal, the female protagonists are so gullible or so deep in denial for 90% of the shows’ runtimes that it’s hard to see their eleventh-hour turns against their guilty husbands as especially triumphant. Presumed Innocent is slightly different because its protagonist is the potentially guilty husband rather than the oblivious wife. If Rusty had been the killer, it would have been us—the viewers—along with Barbara, who Kelley forced into the role of the credulous onlooker who just wanted to believe the best of our handsome leading man.
I think it's for the best that the series ultimately avoided a gender-essentialist conclusion, whether anti-male or anti-female. The problem is that Kelley's Presumed Innocent didn't give us much to replace those psychosexual themes. Never mind all the questions that remain unanswered. (Why did Carolyn, who in flashbacks is so kind to the children she works with, reject her son? Why is Nico such a detached, stoned-sounding weirdo?) The idea that Jaden, a moody but not palpably unhinged teen, faced with a new half-sibling at best or her parents' divorce at worst, flew into a violent rage that can be explained by the phenomenon of disassociation is just silly. It's a shrug more than a solution, tantamount to saying that anyone could kill anyone else for any reason at all.
Taken together with Rusty's decision to cover up a murder he thought Barbara committed, and the parents' instant forgiveness of their daughter's crime, the finale's paltry takeaway is similar, in one crucial way, to the crypto-conservative message of the book and movie. The Sabiches—with whom I think we're supposed to empathize—value their unity over all else. In moving on, by the final scene of the season, to share a festive Thanksgiving (albeit one where Rusty and Barbara trade guilty glances), they've defeated threats to the family unit in the form of both the criminal justice system and a divorced woman who'd cruelly cast aside her own child. For this traditional (if biracial, though Kelley barely reckons with that identity throughout the season), heterosexual, two-parent household, the ends justify the means. I guess we'll have to wait until Season 2, which was announced earlier this month, to see if Kelley intends to subvert this noxious trope as well.
Watch Presumed Innocent on Apple TV.
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