PRESUMED INNOCENT
With Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, Greta Scacchi, Brian Dennehy, and Raul Julia.
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The Frank Pierson-Alan J. Pakula screenplay juggles a number of other topics–political back stabbing, child abuse, police corruption, purloined evidence, shattered idealism. The film’s tone is somber and angst-ridden, with characters muttering or whispering most of the dialogue.
This sotto voce thriller is being promoted as a bracing antidote to this summer’s clamorous, mindless Hollywood output–a cavalcade of gunplay, explosions, car crashes, and similar carnage. But thematically as well as formally, Presumed Innocent is simply inert. Just as the invention of photography liberated painters from the stifling constraints of realism, one might suppose that television would have put an end to this kind of filmmaking–interminable chatter and purely functional imagery (static camera work, alternating close-ups and establishing shots). Apart from some rather clinical discussion of the contents of the dead woman’s vagina and an extended, low- voltage lovemaking flashback featuring the partially unclad Ford and Scacchi, Presumed Innocent is as unadventurously bland as any Ted Turner cut-and-paste made-for-television feature.
Implausibility is not necessarily a cardinal sin in a suspense picture. Hitchcock’s sublime Vertigo, for example, shamelessly strains credibility. But Hitchcock uses the genre as a vehicle for exploring personal, poetic themes–romantic intoxication, fetishism, and necrophilia, to name only a few. Pierson and Pakula are only concerned about who killed Carolyn Polhemus and why, and therefore are under stricter obligation to make their plot believable. Throughout, the question of Rusty’s guilt is irritatingly fudged. Because he appears in virtually every scene, crucial information has to be concealed to keep us guessing. After the murderer’s identity has been exposed, one can’t help feeling like a chump for having been toyed with so dishonestly.
