[Spoilers abound, obviously.]
There was every reason for the Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent to depart from the 1990 film that was based on the same Scott Turow novel. To refresh your memory: In the movie's final twist, after Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford) is acquitted of the murder of his lover, Carolyn Polhemus, he is confronted with the awful truth: His loving wife, Barbara (Bonnie Bedelia) killed Carolyn, out of jealousy and anger that she excuses as a desire to protect her family. Rusty knows that Barbara cannot realistically be prosecuted after his high-profile trial, and he wouldn't take her away from their son anyway. So he resigns himself to the guilt of knowing that his actions led to Carolyn's death.
In the finale of the new TV series, Rusty (Jake Gyllenhaal) is again acquitted, and he again comes home and has a confrontation with Barbara (Ruth Negga). He tells her he's known all along that she killed Carolyn; he knew it as soon as he saw Carolyn's body. In fact, he discovered and staged the crime scene in order to protect her. A horrified Barbara, however, seems rather convincingly shocked that her husband believes (and has believed for months) that she committed a murder. And indeed, as both Barbara and Rusty discover together when they are interrupted, she did not.
The murder was instead committed by their daughter, Jaden (Chase Infiniti). Jaden went to see Carolyn to confront her about her affair with Rusty, and when Carolyn told Jaden that she was pregnant with Rusty's child, Jaden beat her to death with the fireplace poker.
After this revelation, and Rusty's hugs and reassurance that they're just never going to talk about it again, because they're "a family and [they] love each other," we move to a montage of all of the characters basically living happily ever after. The images of Rusty's family are so awash in traditional domesticity that we actually see Barbara and Jaden taking a turkey out of the oven. Jaden is unaffected by having beaten someone to death and carrying this secret for the rest of her life. Over dinner, the kids laugh, Rusty and Barbara look warmly at each other, with only the slightest hint of melancholy, and we are out.
So everything is basically fine, except of course for Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve), who is still dead. But perhaps to make a nuclear family omelet, you have to break a few single, unattached eggs!
The sexism baked into the show and the movie
It's difficult to defend the gender politics of the 1990 movie, which came out during a time when getting the figurative death penalty for interfering with domestic bliss wasn't uncommon for women. (Fatal Attraction is probably the most famous example). But at least it, like the novel, ended with the sense that Rusty would forever live in a hell of his own making. Here, the marriage triumphs much more purely: as parents, Rusty and Barbara are now united to protect Jaden, and Rusty has been restored to his position as the strong and noble head of the family. Nobody really seems mad at him anymore.
It's impossible to separate the choices that the creators of this show, led by David E. Kelley, made about the murder from the treatment of the character of Carolyn throughout. She was a paper-thin sketch. It sure seems baffling that she would have invited Rusty's teenage daughter into her house (!), had a conversation with her about the affair (!!), and then hit her with the fact that she was pregnant (!!!). But it's impossible to know what Carolyn would or would not have realistically done, given that Jaden's conversation with her, which takes about 45 seconds, is one of the few times in the series where Carolyn says anything at all.
As much as the big-haired, power-suited, more aggressive version of Carolyn played by Greta Scacchi in 1990 fit into stereotypes about women in the workplace and the threats they posed to wives at home, this one is equally unpleasant in making Carolyn nothing at all. The decision to cast and then waste Renate Reinsve, who was so captivating in the film The Worst Person in the World, is perplexing. This was an opportunity to make Carolyn more of a person; they went the other way.
Without Rusty's resignation to his life of guilt and isolation, and with his rallying beside his wife to protect their fundamentally good-hearted child, what you get is a stronger sense that Carolyn simply doesn't matter at all. That she was murdered doesn't matter, that her murder is going to be covered up doesn't matter, that her blinking out of existence (and, of course, having her corpse abused by Rusty when he staged the crime scene) doesn't matter. All that matters is the family, the family, the family is going to be OK now, and that's what's important. And unlike in the film and the book, where guilt drenched the final moments, the family doesn't even have to feel bad. Pull that turkey out of the oven, folks, we're doing home and hearth!
There is a lot to like in this series. As with a lot of snazzy streaming projects, the performances from known powerhouse actors are not the problem. Gyllenhaal is good. Negga is good. Peter Sarsgaard is good. O-T Fagbenle is good. It's entertaining enough on that basis alone, even if it sags in the middle quite a bit, as so many similar series do. (Why did we need that side trip into Barbara's flirtation with the bartender?) It fits comfortably into what James Poniewozik called "Mid TV" in The New York Times in April.
But that ending is a big dud. It's much more conventional than the people behind the show seem to think, given that "the teenager did it" is a standard Law & Order resolution to similar stories of family strife that end in violence. And rather than wriggling out of the sexism that exists in the original story, it just makes the same mistakes in a new way. Presenting a woman as a relentless climber who wants to sleep her way to the top is sexist, but it's not necessarily worse than presenting her as nothing at all. Making her murder an obstacle that a happy family uses to reaffirm its deep bonds and then just ... moves past? That is how you signal that a character's humanity is irrelevant to the story. And that makes her a prop, not a person.
You deserved better, Carolyn Polhemus.
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