The Twist Ending of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Presumed Innocent Is Frankly Too Preposterous to Believe
This post contains spoilers for all versions of Presumed Innocent.
It seemed likely that David E. Kelley’s adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1987 legal thriller Presumed Innocent would opt to change the story’s ending, fingering another killer. And so it did—but not before Kelley faked out audiences familiar with the novel and with Alan Pakula’s 1990 film adaptation, by echoing dialogue from the film. In this scene, disgraced prosecutor Rusty Sabich (played in the Apple TV+ series by Jake Gyllenhaal) confronts his wife, Barbara (Ruth Negga), with his belief that she killed his lover, Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve).
“I actually knew from the beginning, and then I didn’t know,” Rusty tells Barbara in the series’ climactic confrontation in the family garage. “And then I knew for sure.” Gyllenhaal’s Rusty is a less clever and self-possessed man than the film adaptation’s, played by Harrison Ford, from his hubristic belief that he could cover up his affair with Carolyn to his inability to control the violent temper that leads him to beat up Brian Ratzer (Marco Rodríguez), the lowlife he claims throughout is his favored suspect. According to this final account, he initially assumed that Barbara was the killer but couldn’t square that with her composure the next day. This, presumably, is why he so feverishly and self-defeatingly hounds Ratzer while conducting his own very irregular investigation of the crime.
The Rusty Sabich of the 1990 movie learns in the end that his fate has been driven by two ruthless women. Greta Scacchi’s Carolyn, with whom Rusty is passionately obsessed, dumped him as soon as she realized he had no intention of seeking his boss’s job and took up with his boss instead. She was also sleeping with the very same judge trying Rusty’s case. With her near-demonic and blatantly instrumental sexiness, Carolyn cuts a swath through Rusty’s professional world, a world that otherwise consists entirely of men who are helpless before her wiles.
On the other side is Barbara, the murderer in both Turow’s novel and Pakula’s film, where she is played with fragile prettiness by Bonnie Bedelia. That the ending of the 1990 film was considered so surprising is a testament to how skillfully Pakula’s direction and Bedelia’s underrated performance deflect suspicion away from Barbara. If not Rusty, the jilted lover, then wouldn’t the next most likely suspect naturally be his wronged wife? Bedelia’s Barbara isn’t so much sympathetic as she is ancillary, like most aggrieved wives of crime fighters in pop culture. That narrative habit tricks us into thinking that the only things that matter about her are whether she believes Rusty did it and whether she’ll stick by him.
Ruth Negga’s Barbara is sympathetic, even as the series subdues the ordinarily vibrant and nervy actor under the weighted blanket of the Sabiches’ luxuriously gray suburban life. This Barbara is given an extended flirtation with a handsome bartender, a strong sign that she is perfectly capable of imagining a life without Rusty and therefore wouldn’t feel compelled to kill to keep him. Reinsve’s Carolyn has also been softened. She’s not trying to sleep her way to the top of the DA’s office, and she’s pregnant with Rusty’s child, a child she is planning to keep despite her determination to break it off with Rusty. In the 1990 film, a major point of evidence in Rusty’s defense hangs on the fact that Caroline has taken the “unwomanly” step of having a tubal ligation.
Kelley’s series opts to cut the suave defense attorney Sandy Stern (a popular Turow character appearing across multiple books) and emphasize the story’s villains, Tommy Molto and Nico Della Guardia, deliciously played by Peter Sarsgaard and O-T Fagbenle, respectively. After hinting that Tommy himself had a thing for Carolyn, Episode 7 ended with him clutching his cat as he stares at the fireplace poker, the missing murder weapon, menacingly deposited in his living room with a nasty note attached. Tommy would have no reason to do this if he were the killer, and besides, he owns a cat, which every other male character regards as comically emasculating. (Seriously, fuck the dog people responsible for this slander. They had me rooting for Tommy by the end, and in truth, our boy did good despite the flimsiness of the evidence against Rusty.)
Instead, in a frankly preposterous twist, the killer is revealed to be Jaden (Chase Infiniti), Rusty and Barbara’s daughter. Like the film version’s Barbara, Jaden hasn’t really registered as a full human being. Even more than her brother, whose presence near the crime scene and whose anger over the state of his parents’ marriage made him a long-shot suspect, Jaden has been an instrumental presence, the face of the family that Rusty and Barbara struggle to preserve for the sake of family itself. She’s been less a character than the generic embodiment of what her parents stand to lose.
And Jaden never amounts to more than that. Presumably she’s a traumatized child—the victim, in a sense, of her father’s infidelity, just like Carolyn. But she is also a murderer. If the blood on her hands haunts her, we see no sign of it. After devoting eight episodes to contemplating the great puzzle of Rusty’s character and whether he’s capable of such violence, we’re asked to accept that his apparently gentle teenage daughter simply bludgeoned a woman to death. Kelley explains away one of the more grotesque aspects of the crime, the hog-tying of Carolyn’s corpse, as Rusty’s attempt to cover up for his wife, but offers no indication of what Jaden herself made of this desecration when learning of it later.
The series concludes with a montage of all the characters going on with their lives and an aerial shot of the Sabiches’ suburb while the old Cindy Walker song “You Don’t Know Me” plays. We don’t know what secrets and crimes lurk behind the tranquil fa?ade of upper-middle-class American life, is the obvious message. And sure—I’ll give them that: We don’t know what people will do to hold on to the good things they’ve got. But in this case, I also don’t believe it.
