When older film fans lament the loss of the mid-budget movie made for grown-ups, Presumed Innocent is an obvious example of what they have in mind. The 1990 adaptation of Scott Turow’s best-selling legal thriller — starring Harrison Ford as a prosecutor charged with killing his mistress — wasn’t meant to be high art, but it was nonetheless made by and for grownups. Writer/director Alan J. Pakula was responsible for All the President’s Men, Sophie’s Choice, Klute, and The Parallax View, among other classics. Ford was (and still is) one of our great movie stars, and the supporting cast was littered with great character actors like Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia, John Spencer, and Bonnie Bedelia. Next year, Ford will join the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the fourth Captain America film, but in the Nineties, there was an unofficial Legal Cinematic Universe, where A-listers like him, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, and Denzel Washington would rush to headline films based on novels by the likes of Turow and John Grisham. (Pakula directed one of each, also teaming with Roberts and Washington for a take on Grisham’s The Pelican Brief.)
Between radical economic shifts in the movie industry and the rise of cable and streaming dramas, those kinds of stories — not blockbuster franchises, but also not blatant Oscar plays — now almost exclusively go straight to the small screen. And since the concept of the made-for-TV movie is all but extinct, it means that we see lots of prestige-laden miniseries, where big stars have between six to 10 hours to really get cozy with a character and plot. Sometimes, this elongated approach can pay huge dividends, as we saw earlier this year with how Netflix’s Ripley brilliantly took a procedure-heavy approach to a story that had already been told at more compact length. More often than not, though, these limited series can’t disguise their nature as something that would have been better off at feature film length, and that get bogged down in this other format.
The Apple TV+ reboot of Presumed Innocent is unfortunately the more common example of this. It’s a polished, handsome adaptation, flanking Jake Gyllenhaal’s star wattage with an impressive ensemble. Yet somehow, despite being more than three times longer than the film, its story feels simpler, and its characters less complex. Anyone with even vague memories of the film will grow impatient, while viewers new to the material will likely wonder how so much talent resulted in such a middling show.
Gyllenhaal plays Rozat “Rusty” Sabich, the trusted number two to incumbent Chicago District Attorney Raymond Horgan (Bill Camp). Rusty is still trying to rebuild his marriage to Barbara (Ruth Negga) in the wake of his messy affair with colleague Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve) when Carolyn is murdered in grisly fashion. Raymond — oblivious to the relationship, and the massive conflict of interest — assigns Rusty to the case. But when Raymond loses re-election to Nico Della Guardia (O-T Fagbenie), Nico replaces Rusty with henchman Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgard), who is both vengeful and smart enough to recognize that Rusty should be their chief suspect.
Turow’s plot this time is in the hands of TV legend David E. Kelley. At the time the movie came out, Kelley was in the midst of an acclaimed run as showrunner of the hit L.A. Law, and would go on to dominate the TV legal space for the next 20-odd years with shows like The Practice, Ally McBeal, and Boston Legal. Lately, he’s reinvented himself as the TV business’s go-to man for these kinds of tony literary adaptations, like Big Little Lies or Netflix’s A Man in Full from earlier this year. Sometimes, these are beloved hits, and sometimes, they are The Undoing.
With Presumed Innocent, Kelley has made the odd choice to fill more time by simplifying the story. Several notable characters have either been removed entirely, or combined with others. In the book and movie, for instance, Rusty hires flamboyant defense attorney Sandy Stern (wonderfully played by Raul Julia) when Tommy and Nico put him on trial for Carolyn’s murder. Here, he just convinces Raymond to switch teams, since no one knows the key players better. Though Nico and Tommy are oily to varying degrees, there’s much less of a sense of institutional corruption this time around than in the book or film. In earlier versions, Carolyn has a long history of sleeping with male colleagues as a way to get ahead, which adds complications to both the mystery and our understanding of her; here, Rusty is her only lover of this type, at least in the episodes shown to critics. We were not given the finale, so I don’t know if Kelley has kept the famous original ending or changed the identity of who killed Carolyn, and why.
But these other changes strip away a lot of the nuance and narrative engagement that was there on the page and in the Ford movie, and sections of the season can drag as a result. About the only area where the show seems to take advantage of the added running time is with Barbara, and in its elaborate depiction of her feelings about her husband, the affair with Carolyn, and the harsh spotlight the trial has cast on her and their kids.
Negga’s very good, but then, so is pretty much the whole cast, regardless of how much the actors are given to play. Bill Camp takes obvious pleasure in playing a character as unfiltered as Raymond, who at one point boasts, “Nothing’s beneath me. I once fucked an ottoman.” James Hiroyuki Liao pops off the screen as temperamental medical examiner Herbert “Painless” Kumagai, and if Tommy is the kind of creep that Sarsgard has often played before, it’s because he always does it so well.
Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, has tried his best to avoid typecasting, playing characters on a wide range of morality and temperament, from upright rocket boy Homer in October Sky to monstrous cameraman Louis in Nightcrawler. (Mr. Music from John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch is probably closer to the Louis end of things.) Gyllenhaal, Kelley, and directors Anne Sewitsky and Greg Yaitanes take advantage of that versatility — and that history — to leave open the very real possibility that our hero is in fact the perpetrator of the crime for which he’s on trial.
Like a lot of these miniseries, Presumed Innocent has so much talent on hand that it can be compelling in short bursts. But unless Kelley has a dazzling ending in mind — whether a new spin on Turow’s, or one of his own invention — there’s very little to justify the amount of time viewers would have to spend to get there, versus saving time by just renting the movie.
The first two episodes of Presumed Innocent are now streaming on Apple TV+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first seven of eight episodes.
Michaela Coel in ‘The Christophers.’Claudette Barius/NEON