Film Friday: Presumed Innocent (1990)

Presumed Innocent is the best legal thriller ever filmed. It’s gripping, it’s tense. It’s incredibly realistic. It’s populated with real characters with real motivations. It’s unpredictable. It’s thoroughly enjoyable. Needless to say, I recommend it.

** Major Spoiler Alert **

Plot

Presumed Innocent is a legal thriller that revolves around the murder of an assistant district attorney a few weeks before the district attorney must stand for re-election against a challenger who is proving to be more than a match. Desperate to get the murder solved immediately, the district attorney assigns the top prosecutor, Rusty Sabitch, to investigate the murder. Unfortunately, Rusty was having an affair with the victim and soon becomes a suspect. As the story twists and turns, it becomes a courtroom drama that leaves you more and more convinced that Rusty did it.

Why This Film Works

Legal thrillers are one of the more popular genres. Sadly, most legal thrillers are garbage. Whether it’s cardboard characters or plots that are laughably fantastic, few legal thrillers are more than generic action films where the heroes wear suits instead of guns. Some even rely on chase scenes to create drama. . . lookin' at you Grisham. So when you come across a legal thriller with brains and integrity, it’s pretty impressive. Presumed Innocent is such a thriller. And what makes this film work is the complexity of the characters and how their motivations drive their actions which in turn drive the plot, rather than the plot dictating their actions. Indeed, this film is driven by the conflicts that arise when characters with different motives clash and when their own internal motives conflict. This creates uncertainty for the audience as to how events will play out and it gives the film a natural and real feeling as the plot springs from the consequences of the actions of the characters rather than from abstract plot points.

Consider for example, the main character: Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford). On the surface, Rusty is a hard-nosed prosecutor. He’s a bit of an idealist who has lost his idealism and never quite made it to the top because he lacked the ambition to be the top dog. He makes up for that by drowning his time in minutia. He also has a lovely wife and son, who he seems to love. But as we scratch the surface, we learn that there is another side to him as well. This side had an affair with a woman at the office, Carolyn Polhemus, and he became obsessed with her. Even now, long after the affair has ended, he still seems obsessed.

Rusty’s character will be tested when he is asked to investigate Polhemus’ death. Can he overcome his obsession? Will his affair with her come out? Hiding it goes against his duty to his boss and will hinder his investigation. Taking on the assignment also will alienate him from his wife. All of this causes tremendous drama throughout the film. Adding to that drama, by the way, was the brilliant casting of Harrison Ford. Ford brings so much confidence and good will to the role that we find it hard to believe that Rusty can be so weak and obsessed as he seems, and that makes these revelations shocking for us in a way that casting someone more malleable would not. Indeed, it’s jarring to think of Ford as obsessed and that pulls us into the character in a visceral way and unsettles us.

Rusty alone would have been great drama, but he’s just the beginning. Conflicting with Rusty, you have Rusty’s boss Raymond Horgan (Brian Dennehy). Raymond is a friend of Rusty, but he’s also a politician with questionable integrity, and as Raymond slowly loses his bid for reelection as the District Attorney, he starts to lash out at Rusty. When he loses, he even decides, out of spite, to drag Rusty down as punishment for his own failures. This adds massive amounts of drama to the story, which is then made all the stronger in that the winner of the election, Nico Della Guardia and his underling Tommy Molto, both dislike Rusty. So when the evidence points toward Rusty, they run with it and spin everything against Rusty. Even the characters Rusty encounters while doing his job, like Dr. Kumagai, are in divided camps over the election and may or may not be helping or hindering the investigation. All of this gives the sense of Rusty being under siege both from without and within as he races against the clock on a doomed mission that will blow up on him much more spectacularly than you ever could have guessed.

At the same time, you have Rusty’s wife (Bonnie Bedelia), who is a desperate housewife. She feels like her world has collapsed, as she’s blown her chance at a career because she can’t finish her dissertation and her marriage is a failure as Rusty had the affair. And while Rusty is in the middle of being prosecuted, he needs to work to repair his relationship with his wife, or at least not make it worse.

All of this makes for a deep, deep film because each character feels real, i.e. they don’t just exist to make the plot work, and because most of them are unpredictable because their motives conflict with their obligations to Rusty, so you don’t know which way they will go until they finally act. Further, since these conflicts drive their actions and therefore the plot, the story feels tight. It doesn’t feel like a plot with characters jammed into it. This is excellent writing, and it continues even beyond the main characters. Indeed, you have fantastic characters throughout this film. Think about Polhemus, who uses men to work her way up the ladder and throws them away the moment she spots weakness within them. She plays with fire by building up insecure and weak men and then ripping away the security she has given them the instant she realizes they are weak. In this way, she causes them to feel deeply insecure and brings about their obsessions with her, which will ultimately be her undoing. Alternatively, consider Sandy Stern (Raul Julia) whom Rusty hires to defend him. Stern comes across as part oracle part statesman. He is easily one of the most impressive attorneys ever presented on film and the scenes with him are a joy to watch – made all the better by the truly solid acting of Julia. I know many attorneys who said they went to law school because they wanted to be Sandy Stern. Consider also Judge Larren Lyttle, who is one of the most realistic judges you will find on screen. He’s commanding and professional before the jury, but funny and friendly in his private conferences. He’s thoughtful and tempered and fair, yet no nonsense. He also has a complex past.

And that brings us to the legal aspect. As a lawyer, I pull my hair out when I see films make a mockery of the legal system: impossible computer searches for information that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be kept on computer if it did. Juror misconduct. The famous “that’s highly unusual, but I’ll allow it” from judges who seem to start and stop their trials randomly to allow the plot to work. Rulings that make no sense. Attorneys who break all the rules of procedure and ethics as their opponents inexplicable sit on their hands. These things are cheating by lazy writers. Yet, Presumed Innocent never falls for that. The reason this film feels so well constructed is because it stays true to the characters and it stays true to the law. Presumed Innocent follows real trial procedures and uses rulings that would actually be issued. This was a fantastic decision because it imposed a sort of discipline on the writer (Scott Turow), which forced him to really think through how everything needed to happen for his story to make sense. In other words, he doesn’t fake it, i.e. this story happens the only way it could in real life. That is perhaps the greatest thing you can say about a story, that the writer presented a story which simply could not have worked in any other way, and that is the case here. Not only was this an excellent and entertaining story, a creative story with an original, unpredictable and twisting plot-line acted out by deep and complex characters, but in the end there is no other way this film could have gone given the underlying facts. That is evidence of truly inspired writing. It’s also no coincidence that Presumed Innocent, in my opinion, is not only the most realistic, but also the best legal thriller out there.