Review of Presumed Innocent (1990) by Ethan P — 22 Oct 2016

Presumed Innocent is a brooding legal drama that's laced with intrigue and deception. It is filmed to be forbidding with its stark settings, brown and black tones and characters shuffling through the shadows of bland offices and court rooms. It is the noir of legal dramas, with its sinister plot and shady characters. Rusty, the man at the center of the film, is a quiet and angry man who internalizes the loss of his lover and the unfortunate, damning charges against him. Harrison Ford manages to balance appearing both innocent and guilty at once throughout the film. In looking and feeling like a dark, smoky murder mystery legal drama, Presumed Innocent nails it.

Part of its strength is the intricate, intertwining plot. Rusty is assigned to find the rapist murderer of a woman he had an affair with who also worked with him and slept with his boss. Her murder ruins his boss run at reelection for the DA and when the new DA charges Rusty, Rusty finds out that he's been framed for her murder, his old boss has turned on him and the judge also slept with his mistress. All of these conflicting motives combine to create an engaging and mysterious story where the result is never predictable and the circumstances are often incredibly strange.

The most interesting part of the film is the shocking conclusion where we find that the one motive that was largely ignored, Rusty's wife's jealousy, was the most essential motive to the film and it set that ugly chain of events in motion. In the case of this noir, the grim anti-hero is actually outdone by two femme-fatales, his conniving mistress and his vengeful wife. This provides a strong sense of mistrust both between the characters and the plot, in the uncertainty of what will happen next. My one parting thought is that the sensual scenes in the film are incredible. Rusty's mistress is beautiful and the scenes are intimately captured with a lot of style.