In the best performance of Jake Gyllenhaal’s career, the erstwhile Mysterio plays a man whose obsession with solving a mystery gradually consumes his entire life. As real-life political cartoonist Robert Graysmith in David Fincher’s Zodiac, Gyllenhaal goes from a disarming dork to a nervy, alienating amateur detective over the course of 150-odd minutes. In Apple TV+’s new adaptation of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (previously adapted into a Harrison Ford movie in 1990), Gyllenhaal makes that shift so fast that it happens in the second or third scene.
Gyllenhaal stars as Rusty Sabich, a successful Chicago prosecutor in who’s introduced describing the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” to a trial jury – effectively laying out the entire thesis of Presumed Innocent and giving us an introduction to how the law is supposed to work at the same time. Almost immediately after that, Rusty gets a call that a woman he works with has been found murdered, and given his difficulty getting the words out when he tells his wife (whose measured reaction also says a lot) and his panicked arrival at the victim’s home, it’s abundantly clear that this wasn’t just a woman from the office.
From there, a series of lies that Rusty has been building begins to unravel, but it’s less like a knot that needs to be untangled and more like a neatly rolled-up string that just works itself out with the slightest tug. He’s supposed to be a good prosecutor, but he’s apparently not particularly good at cheating on his wife. And as Rusty becomes increasingly manic trying to convince everyone around him that he didn’t commit the crime – even as all the (circumstantial) evidence says otherwise – it becomes harder and harder to put up with his needless lying. If he really didn’t do it, then why not just come clean about everything? And if he did do it, why are we watching a show about a guy who is so adamant about not doing it?
The answer is that there’s something more savvy going on here, as Presumed Innocent weaponizes Gyllenhaal’s penchant for being unlikeable – as seen throughout his career, whether he’s blowing it with Chloë Sevigny in Zodiac, orchestrating violent car crash footage in Nightcrawler, or (allegedly) not giving Taylor Swift her scarf back or whatever in “All Too Well.” He knows how to crank up the off-putting vibes that made him a cool kid in Donnie Darko to become ajust plain off-putting grown-up, and that’s exactly what he’s doing in Presumed Innocent.
Every time Rusty betrays the trust of one of his few friends (or his wife, played with a crucially steady hand by Ruth Negga) or makes a bone-headed decision that will make him look extremely guilty to anyone watching, you kind of want him to take the fall and get put away forever so everyone can just live their lives in peace. But then he has an emotional moment with his family or a realistically depicted panic attack or a moment of realization when it hits him that the people he helped put away were treated just as roughly as he is now, and you remember that he didn’t do it and he should be presumed innocent.
Therein lies the quietly clever secret to Gyllenhaal’s role in all this, calling back to the very first scene. This is a show that challenges us at almost every turn (especially early on) to remember the supposed underpinnings of the American justice system. Rusty Sabich seems guilty as hell in the first episode, and he just seems more and more guilty as Presumed Innocent goes on (even when alternate suspects begin to take shape).
Having to tolerate a guy who strains tolerability for so long gets tiring.It’s a compelling gimmick, to the extent that “an actor’s vibes” can be considered a gimmick, but it doesn’t always work in the show’s favor. At the risk of referring back to Zodiac for a third time, that’s one movie where Gyllenhaal plays one of several central characters. This is a whole season of television that is almost entirely focused on him, so having to tolerate a guy who strains tolerability for so long gets tiring. Then there’s the matter of Peter Sarsgaard’s Tommy Molto, a rival prosecutor who is so outwardly villainous that it’s a surprise he’s not the murder victim. If Presumed Innocent wanted to pull a trick by making its protagonist hard to root for, then it shouldn’t have made its antagonist even less appealing. It needlessly muddies an otherwise fascinating commentary on our justice system and our famous Hollywood actors.
