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Film lover and zine-er Katie Stebbins joins to discuss Alan J. Pakula's smart, understated legal thriller Presumed Innocent featuring Harrison Ford in one of his finest performances. Taut, richly detailed, and featuring a considerable bench of "that guy" character actors (including John Spencer, Joe Grifasi, and Brian Dennehy), the film rises above the usual theatrics of the Grisham-era Hollywood legal drama with a crackerjack, densely-packed script that rewards upon repeat viewings while never sacrificing its immediacy.
We discuss Harrison Ford in the early 90s, his contemporaneous swings into dramatic territory, and the considered decisions to separate the film's protagonist Rusty Sabich from audience's familiarity with the Harrison Ford action-hero brand. Then, we look at the film's complex narrative features (adapted from a book by lawyer-turned-novelist Scott Turrow) and how the film weaves in its rich details with respect for its audience's ability to connect the dots. Finally, we discuss the Extended Presumiverse - sequel novels and television adaptations of the further works within the Scott Turrow canon, including the most recent AppleTV+ series by David E. Kelley starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.
Follow Katie Stebbins on Twitter.
Check out Katie's Etsy for cool prints and film zines.
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Our theme song is "Mirror" by Chris Fish
Hey, Hit Factory listeners, if you're enjoying and want even more Hit Factory, including the entirety of this episode, consider becoming a patron of the show at patreon.com/hitfactorypod. For just $5 per month, you'll get access to our premium bi-weekly episodes, bonus episodes, and a lot more. Thanks for listening and supporting. What I love so much about the economy of the storytelling in the film is, as I've mentioned, how succinctly and how deliberately it gives us that exposition, the way it reveals all of these intricate, different agendas and different motivations. Like, Tommy Molto, this attorney, is mentioned in the opening minutes of the film. Before we see him, we don't even see him until that hour mark after the election results coming in, like, for the first time when we see Joe Grafosse as Tommy Molto, like, that's when it finally happens, but his character and sort of the threat he poses hovers over the film for the entire first hour before you finally get introduced to him, and there's just this, the structure of it is subtly brilliant. You have all of these different characters and all these different players, their motivations being mentioned, you understand the stakes, and I think even more so than that, what I love is how lived in the world feels. There are, without explanation, without hand holding references to Delaguardia as delay, the nickname that he, you know, received while he was working in the prosecuting attorney's office because of his method of not ever really letting anything go to court. He's apparently a pretty weak courtroom lawyer, and he would just, you know, delay processes until, you know, people finally settled. They refer to the sort of like chief medical examiner that the DA works with as painless. His nickname is painless. And I just, I love a movie like this where you enter into it and it just kind of demands that you keep up with it and fill in those gaps and just kind of let the thing roll because it's so assured and also because it's unwilling to sort of break that metatextual boundary to say, like, we know that you're not following along, let's take a minute to catch you up, and it just allows its characters to exist as they would in its environment. Yeah, they, I really appreciate how, like you said, the lack of hand holding in this movie. They really throw you into this world. I mean, it starts the morning that Carolyn is, or the morning that we learned that Carolyn has been murdered and you're expected. They don't do setup really before that, it's all kind of happening concurrently where he's learning about that. We're also taking in information about characters we're hearing about, about this election, about these sort of who this woman was, what his reactions to all of this happening are. I mean, there's a lot that it's sort of throwing at you and it does it very methodically, it does it very assuredly and in ways that allow you the space to sort of pick up on things and to put the pieces together. And I love what you said about it feeling so lived in, and that is such a cool thing. Like, with everyone's desks, everyone's offices, there's piles everywhere, everyone seems overworked, stressed, there's this pressure of the election coming up, everyone has these dynamics with people that feel very strained. Like when Rusty goes to painless, you know, the Kumaga character and they're talking about the autopsy report and the chemistry report and he's just like read the fucking report. It's just like there's so much of that energy going on where everyone is just very like, you can feel the backlog that everyone is up against within their own work and within the way that they treat each other. It's subtle, but it's like it's not something that is pointed out as a piece of the movie that becomes a moving part. It's more just sort of this background piece where everything feels kind of just loaded and stressed and heavy, and I think that also carries through with the Harrison Ford performance and the character and for other reasons, but there's a heaviness on everything and also a very somber quality to this. It's that somber, the John Williams score, all of that. So there's a lot of that kind of, you can feel the emotional sort of heaviness of it and you can feel like the physical heaviness of like just how overworked everybody is and the strain of the kind of work that they do and, you know, it kind of also plays into sort of when he, when Rusty tells Carolyn in that flashback about like, hey, how many child abuse cases do we get every year? They're all heartbreaking if I had to like, we don't, we cannot dedicate time to like any given one because it's just, there's too much and that kind of air is really hanging over the whole film and the work environments that it brings to life with the production design and the way that it's captured within the cinematography and cool is sort of framing and I really love that. It's magnificent. One of the very first things that struck me was the production design elements here and and just how busy everything felt. There's like this recurring motif that must be just like a production designer kind of flourish. But did you catch that like literally everybody has some sort of like small bust or statue on their desks like they all have some sort of like Grecian or Roman sort of like busts, you know, like as like almost like a paperweight when we go to Sandy Stern's office later, he's got this like jade like dragon on his as well and they all just have these like strange things that combine into what you assume are these kind of like intricate kind of habitual things that they learn from one another but display as different things and it's just, you know, papers and fax machines going and just like the bustle and heaviness of an office and I love your point too that you mentioned, you know, just the the way the film has this sort of kind of cynical view of these kind of keepers of justice and the law where everybody in this movie who works in and around the legal proceedings feels politically rent seeking and duplicitous, totally embittered or otherwise just like completely exhausted or a combination of the three, like everybody is just so strained and beaten down and overworked while also just like, you know, trying to knife one another in the dark and get to like a better position in all of this. Yeah, and that kind of goes in line to, you know, the rusty character and this idea that like, oh, isn't it funny, you still have ideals and, you know, like they haven't been ripped to shreds yet or whatever and rusty is like the shreds are all I have left and it's such a good line and like, you know, this idea that like this is a guy who is still trying to to uphold that sort of sense of justice and believe in what he's doing and and believe in right and wrong and that these things work out organically and that, you know, very nice, he's very naive in a lot in that way and, you know, or maybe it maybe it's I feel like it because he's very smart, I feel like it's also just like maybe he sees it and he just cannot afford to believe anything else and it's, you know, the way that that the way that that plays out with with again all of those dynamics that you're seeing and the way that the production design filters into that I actually going back to that production design I was reading a lot about the work that the actors and Kula did like sort of hanging around DA offices and kind of like observing things and that was really what they were trying to do is like they it was the details they were interested in the mundane details of like how people looked at files like how quickly they would get like just the way that people would do very, very sort of basic everyday things but the rhythms of that and the sort of atmosphere and the energy of that and trying to capture that of the way that people were handling things around them the way that they were with each other and the sort of what the atmosphere was in terms of what these people who were doing this day and day out kind of are bringing to the table and and all of that sort of that observing because he's such a keen observer who of these environments of these work environments all of that comes through in that lived in way I think it pays off in a way that you know I think a lot of other legal thrillers of that that would follow you know aren't necessarily aren't that's not their priority necessarily and that is I think one of the most priorities and and I think that that the stuff that is drawing him to that material which to me are the human the human characters and and the sort of circumstances that people can find themselves in when they think of themselves one way and they believe themselves to be one way and they try to live a life in a certain way and then they find themselves in situations where they are making those different choices where you have that and where you have this sort of the details of this legal life and this legal system and the ways that that plays out in the work life and and in the court and how kind of absurd it ends up in meaninglessness of being.
