Presumed Innocent: Jake Gyllenhaal in Another Throwback Erotic Thriller Reboot
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
The new eight-episode Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent, about a prosecuting attorney accused of the gruesome sexual homicide of a female colleague, is the latest streaming series based on lurid thrillers of the late 80s and early 90s.
It follows last year’s Dead Ringers on Prime Video, an unsubtle but stylish gender-switching reboot of David Cronenberg’s 1988 philosophical horror film, and Paramount+’s critically panned adaptation of Adrian Lynne’s 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction.
The current series is based on Scott Turow’s bestselling 1987 legal thriller which was adapted into a film by Alan J. Pakula and starring Harrison Ford. It was one of the top 10 worldwide box-office grossing films of 1990.
Beyond the obvious logic of streaming services hedging their bets by repackaging familiar content, one wonders why these kinds of films and why now? As with other 80s thrillers such as Fatal Attraction and Jagged Edge, Presumed Innocent is a kind of morality play against Reagan-era moralism and the AIDS crisis, confirming conventional wisdom that marital infidelity leads to terrible consequences.
From a feminist perspective, the films also reflected how the femme fatale of film noir was now part of the managerial class woman in the law office and the boardroom. In her book Misogynies, published in 1989 and updated in 2013, English author Joan Smith devoted a chapter to the depiction of scheming women in Presumed Innocent.
Overall, the new Presumed Innocent series comes with an aura of prestige and expense: executive produced by J.J. Abrams with the prolific TV auteur David E. Kelly (L.A. Law, Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, Big Little Lies) as showrunner.
Jake Gyllenhaal, also executive producer, stars as Chicago’s chief deputy district attorney Rozat “Rusty” Sabich, leading a cast that includes Ruth Negga (Loving, Passing) as Barbara, Rusty’s wife. Peter Sarsgaard is Tommy Molto, Rusty’s rival prosecutor, and Renate Reinsve —the Cannes best actress–winning star of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World — is victim Carolyn Polhemus, seen only in flashbacks.
Rounding out the cast are O-T Fagbenle (The Handmaid’s Tale, Loot) as Nico Della Guardia, the supercilious incoming district attorney, Lily Rabe as a marriage counsellor, Bill Camp as Raymond, the truculent outgoing district attorney and Rusty’s friend and boss, with Elizabeth Marvell as Raymond’s emotionally perceptive wife, Lorraine.
The opening episode finds Gyllenhaal’s Rusty at home in his spacious suburban home with Barbara and their teenaged kids Kyle (Kingston Rumi Southwick) and Jaden (Chase Infiniti) when Raymond calls him with the news that their colleague Carolyn has been found dead, bound, naked and bludgeoned with a poker.
In an office rife with political infighting, Rusty insists on taking the lead in the case over the objections of the openly antagonistic Molto and Della Guardia. When Della Guardia is elected as the new DA, replacing Rusty’s boss Raymond, Molto replaces Rusty as the chief deputy district attorney and takes over the case.
He quickly discovers that that Rusty was intimately involved with the victim and the former prosecutor becomes suspect number one.
Rather than offering any major changes to Turow’s story, Kelly and his team have chosen to renovate and expand the original dark and twisty narrative to more roomy suburban dimensions, providing a showcase for a strong cast playing a spectrum of morally compromised characters.
Gyllenhaal, accustomed to playing alienated outsiders (Donnie Darko, Nightcrawler), conveys a quality of simmering anxiety, a notable contrast to Harrison Ford’s stoical take on the character. (Ford said he saw the character as “a passive, interior character. Though Rusty’s in every scene, all the action takes place around him. Things happen to him.”) By contrast, Gyllenhaal’s Rusty is a doer who repeatedly compounds his own problems through his guilt and narcissism.
Among the supporting cast, Negga offers the film’s most compelling performance as Rusty’s wife, more devoted to her family than her wayward husband. The casting of the Norwegian actress Reinsve, whose face radiates candour and kindness, is refreshingly counterintuitive though her role in flashbacks is regrettably small.
A couple of the male performances are jarring. Sarsgaard, usually a subtle actor, winces through the part of Tommy Molto, a sort of incel given to clunky villain dialogue (“You dismiss me at your peril!”). As well, there’s Fagbenle, a fine British actor who made the puzzling decision to voice Della Guardia with a silky purr sounding like The Lion King’s Scar and not at all like a smooth-talking academically trained Chicagoan politician (he played Obama in the 2022 miniseries, The First Lady).
Given the popularity of the novel and the earlier film, it might be a challenge keeping the identity of the culprit secret. But Apple TV+ has withheld the final episode from reviewers, and the series has enough additional subplots and characters to give us a few new suspects to consider until the final episode.
Packed with narrative turns, cliffhangers, and dead ends, the current series has the recurrent beats of episodic television (there are repeated scenes of Rusty and Barbara’s intimate conversations in their vast suburban backyard) rather than the rising momentum of a thriller. Arguably, this approach is an opportunity to flesh out the characters but some of these tangential subplots feel like padding.
What’s disappointing here is David Kelley’s lack of interest in overhauling the troublesome generic formula of Turow’s narrative. Sure, there are a couple of thoughtful, three-dimensional female characters in the series: Marvel’s empathetic Lorraine, and Nana Mensah as Rusty’s lead investigator, Det. Alana Rodriguez.
As well, in keeping with the current entertainment norms, there are no women’s bare breasts to be ogled, just the male star’s toned backside as Rusty compulsively exercises to exorcise his demons.
Get past the cosmetic tweaks though, and once again, we have a familiar chronicle of an ambitious and deceptive woman who is object of temptation and potential downfall of our hero, a guileless victim of his ego and libido.
Wishing for a narrative upgrade isn’t a call for political correctness, just a wish that series creators could use these reboots to kick some of these pernicious cliches to the curb.
Presumed Innocent. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Bill Camp, Ruth Negga, Elizabeth Marvel, Renate Reinsve, Peter Sarsgaard, and O-T Fagbenle. The first two episodes premiere June 12 on Apple TV+ with new episodes streaming each subsequent Wednesday.