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More often than not, when one of my friends mentions “Presumed Innocent,” they call the show by the name of its very famous lead actor. The recently concluded new Apple TV+ whodunnit, based on the 1987 novel by Scott Turow, becomes, simply, “that Jake Gyllenhaal show,” or something along those lines. And, well, fair enough: one of the chief characteristics of this suspense ride is how very many of its moody, mopy frames rest on Gyllenhaal’s familiar face, his mouth pulled tight and his eyebrows squirming with illegible emotion.
Gyllenhaal plays a talented prosecutor named Rusty Sabich. He’s a public servant in Chicago who seems, at first glance, to be living a semi-suburban dream. His back yard is enormous and begs to be grilled in. His pretty wife, Barbara (Ruth Negga), and daughter, Jaden (Chase Infiniti), lounge and laugh under an umbrella, and his All-American son, Kyle (Kingston Rumi Southwick), practices his pitching. Later on, much of the show’s visual language—muted color emerging from an underpainting of chalky grays—depends on an aura of wild urban unpredictability: Chicago as a hothouse of violent horrors and dark insinuations. But this guy seems to live in maybe Evanston. Nice life.
Almost immediately the idyll ends. One of Rusty’s colleagues, a fellow-prosecutor named Carolyn Polhemus (Renate Reinsve), has been murdered in a grisly way. Carolyn was also, like Rusty, prodigiously talented and highly telegenic. The relationship between, on the one hand, talent and attractiveness and, on the other, moral action, is one of the more subtly implied themes of “Presumed Innocent.” Found in her apartment, Carolyn has been pummelled by a fire poker (the poker is missing from the scene) and tied up tightly in a meticulous geometry of rope.
When the news of the murder reaches him, Rusty rushes to Carolyn’s apartment and broods in the direction of her body. Anne Sewitsky, who directed the first episode and a few others, is erotically attentive to details of the corpse. The bloody face as it grays; the rope and its taut cruelty. The image of the body keeps recurring all series long, a bit of lewd voyeurism that never feels quite justified by the show’s aesthetics otherwise. Nothing else gets so much attention, with the possible exception of, again, Gyllenhaal. It’s a horrible crime, yes, but after a few peeks early on you pretty much get it. Frankness is admirable—this, after all, is our world; these things happen—but flaying our eyeballs like this, not so much.
Rusty is assigned to the case because he’s smarter than everybody else. A lesser rival named Tommy Molto (Peter Sarsgaard), a bitter Salieri to Rusty’s haughty Mozart, fumes. But Rusty’s integrity doesn’t quite match his I.Q.: it comes out that he’s been engaged in an obsessive affair with Carolyn, hiding it even from his boss and best friend, Raymond Horgan (the always excellent, here perfectly cast Bill Camp). It turns out that Carolyn was pregnant with Rusty’s child. He goes from golden child to chief suspect, just like that.
Rusty does what troubled men on TV so often do to rest their minds: go swimming. Remember Don Draper trying to clean himself up and curb his penchant for overboozing? Gyllenhaal’s Rusty, stressed out and overburdened by circumstantial evidence that points at him in neon lights, is much the same. He sulks underwater and, internally, flashes back to snippets of nicer times with Carolyn. Sometimes he ideates as if he were the killer—as if their final argument had really led to her body being trussed up on the stained carpet of her living room. These bad dreams could share a title with O. J. Simpson’s infamous, trolling book: “If I Did It.”
When Rusty’s not harvesting endorphins, he goes to couples therapy with Barbara. She knew about the affair, but thought that it was long finished, a quick blip in a long marriage. But Rusty and Carolyn were truly in love, at least at first. By the end, though—he was, of course, at her house on the night of her death—he was lovesick and scary. One of his thirty or so final unanswered texts to her: “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Now Barbara is hurt afresh but unable to leave him in the middle of such a high-profile trial. Negga is a sensitive performer who is sometimes let down by the material given to her quivering character. We know she’s been scorned and that she has an instinctive defensiveness about keeping her family together, but not much else. Her personality bends to meet the necessities of the plot. At some point, she does what the wives of troubling men on TV often do: consider an affair. After she’s gently dismissed from her job at an art gallery—the trial promises too much unwanted attention—she starts frequenting a bar, where she flirts with a hip bartender (Sarunas J. Jackson). His real passion is for making colorful projections and calling them art.
It’s easy (especially if you’re not familiar with the book or the 1990 movie adaptation, starring Harrison Ford) to become engulfed in the work of toggling among possible killers and riding the wave of public opinion as various witnesses take the stand. The big question—whether Rusty did it—stays alive, though, at the expense of keeping his personality plausible. Sometimes he’s magnetic and sympathetic; at other times he seems to be a nasty ex-jock, the kind of popular, supposedly good kid who’s just waiting to administer a clandestine noogie on the way to accept his latest trophy. The women he works with in the prosecutor’s office all seem to nurse limerent crushes on him, but he carries himself like an unsecret creep. Gyllenhaal’s face puts up a noble effort, furrowing and winking and ruminating and begging to be believed, but, like a lost trumpeter, it can’t always keep up with the changes. Rusty needs to look guilty and look innocent, often within the same minute or so. Something’s gotta give.
“Presumed Innocent” is a fun, lurid, flawed, addictive whodunnit. Inseparable from its appeal are its sloppy, sloshy swerves between florid melodrama—never have I witnessed such an inopportunely timed cardiac episode—and minute realism. Between Reinsve, who is Norwegian, and O-T Fagbenle, an Englishman playing the recently elected D.A., the “American” accents on display are a bounty all their own. In Sarsgaard—so brilliant, as ever—the show has its own sort of in-house critic. Tommy, left to prosecute the case against Rusty, has inherited a bum gig. Not that he thinks so: he’s excited, finally, to get back at the prom king and score a victory of his own. He’s obviously a jerk, too, but, endearingly, he doesn’t know it and therefore hasn’t figured out how to hide it. He can’t understand why his co-workers all have “some kind of problem” with him. He looks askance, jealously, at Rusty’s charisma and good fortune, and goes about his work with a wounded earnestness. Sarsgaard tends to this man’s sore ego like a gardener to a fern. It’s enough to make you want to cry. He bumbles and veers toward bombast, a real human among signposts for the story, asking with his eyes, on behalf of every viewer, Just what the hell is going on here? ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
