Review of the series Presumed Innocent

The Jake Gyllenhaal-directed detective and legal series Presumed Innocent is a television remake of the famous feature film starring Harrison Ford, directed by Alan Pakula and based on the novel of the same name by Scott Turow, released in 1990. Obviously, as a thriller, the multi-episode version loses out to the old film because it loses its dynamics and tension due to its length. However, as a personal drama about the "presumption of guilt" and a family drama about a crack in a marriage, the series looks wider and deeper thanks to the more hours at its disposal. And the duet of Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga, who portrayed the protagonist's wife, shows quite subtly (especially the actress's graceful work) how love and alienation between close people exist in the same tight space.

The events have been moved from the 1980s (Thoreau's novel was published in 1987) to the present. Although Chicago looks almost exactly the same: filled with crime and lawyers, the latter dressing and behaving the same in all eras. "Someone is killed every eighteen seconds in this city," says one of the characters, hinting that the Chicago press and Chicago society forget and switch their attention to even the most scandalous and high-profile crime very quickly. Such a crime in this story is the indictment of former deputy prosecutor Rusty Sebich, who becomes the main and only suspect in the brutal murder of his beautiful and sexy colleague Carolyn, with whom, as the investigation reveals, Rusty had not only a working but also a romantic relationship.

The excess of screen time compared to a feature-length adaptation allows the show's authors to slowly clear away moral, ethical, and psychological clutter on several territories at once. Thus, in one conditional sandbox, the characters play politics as they fight for re-election as district attorney and solve the sadistic murder of Carolyn Polimus (Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, winner of the Cannes award for her leading role in the art-house rom-com The Worst Man in the World) is extremely important not only in the criminal and social aspect, but also in the political one. In this very sandbox, a relatively objective detective investigation barely breaks through the subjective attempt to condemn Sebić on the one hand and the hero's equally subjective attempt to justify himself on the other.

In the second sandbox, Rusty, who feels guilty about his infidelity, tries to earn the support of his wife Barbara and to glue his badly fractured marriage together, even visiting a psychotherapist. However, inside this sandbox, there is another one, in which the protagonist alone "plays" without any other players: Here, Rusty is tormented by thoughts of Carolyn (for the audience, this looks like abundant passionate or sentimental flashbacks), whom he obsessively desires and kind of loves even after death, And sometimes, the "legal thriller hero" who is so obsessed with romantic feelings seems frankly pathetic and weak, and his manic love for the murdered woman, which Rusty stubbornly poeticizes, seems to bother him more than the fact that if the prosecution wins, he will be in prison for life.

But there are also more interesting third and fourth territories. One relates directly to the legal concept in the title. In the legal system, the presumption of innocence is a firm principle that any accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty and found guilty in a court of law. The series clearly demonstrates that, contrary to the law, the rule of presumption of guilt is actually applied within society and by oral rather than written norms. That is, society tends to consider every accused guilty until proven innocent. And this applies even to very close, even the closest people.

Thus, Rusty's former boss and best friend, who has taken on the role of his lawyer (Bill Camp), has nightmares about an angry Rusty attacking Carolyn with a poker. And the teenage son, one day at the dinner table, suggests that his father "finally confess" to what he has done... The Presumption of Guilt is based on an extremely simple and clear thesis: absolutely any person (even the one you have known all your life) is partially or, in the worst case, completely closed to another and may turn out to be something other than what he has always seemed.

In the fourth plane of the show's dissection, we return to the eternal gender stereotypes. By the way, a single line from Renate Reinswe's character says more about the modernization of the plot than clothes or gadgets. In Rusty's memoirs, she says: "How good it was in the old days, when two adults could just touch each other...". Of course, this is a stone in today's feminist movement, which has made every intergender touching a harassment and turned the office romance, which was once essential in every office, into an almost extinct dinosaur.

That is, a story from the 1980s is somewhat unlikely today in the sense that a harassment scandal would have surfaced before Rusty or anyone else could have gone to the extreme and killed the target of his harassment. And at the same time, the main twist of that old story (those who have read the book or seen the movie with Harrison Ford know), on the contrary, in the current realities of reassessing standard ideas about femininity and masculinity, sounds more... normative or more normalized

In other words, we can say that Presumption of Innocence is in the same psychological niche as the series The Deer and also redefines the understanding of a "sexual crime" or, in other words, what we have always perceived as a "male crime" ("brutal male crime against a woman"). In other words, the detective story from the 80s is no longer about a shocking resolution, but about the abolition of any differentiation between what is peculiar to women and what is peculiar to men.