Who killed Carolyn? How Apple’s Presumed Innocent changed the book’s ending
Spoilers for all three versions of Presumed Innocent follow
So the twist-laden Jake Gyllenhaal legal thriller Presumed Innocent has finally finished its eight-episode run on Apple TV, with a jaw-dropper of a finale. Some criticised it for being too slow-paced, and others suggested that it was ridiculous and unbelievable throughout.
Certainly, there were many moments where the apparent leeway given to Gyllenhaal’s character Rusty Sabich, a prosecuting lawyer on trial for the murder of his former colleague and lover Carolyn Polhemus, defied belief; not only is he able to defend himself after his mentor and defending attorney, Bill Camp’s Raymond Horgan, suffers a heart attack in court, but he is able to roam around investigating the case when he isn’t loudly denying his guilt.
Yet for all this, there is a reason why it’s one of Apple’s most-watched dramas to date, overtaking the likes of Masters of the Air, Severance and The Morning Show. Not only does it have Gyllenhaal’s star power and charisma in the lead – vital if the essentially unsympathetic main character is to be at all likeable – but a top-class supporting cast including Ruth Negga as Sabich’s wife Barbara, Camp and a splendidly repellent Peter Sarsgaard as Sabich’s former colleague-turned-prosecutor Tommy Molto have made it appointment viewing. In an age of box set binges, Apple’s decision to pace it out week by week, resulting in the suitably twist-laden, jaw-dropping finale, has paid dividends.
Still, the show – created and largely written by super-scribe David E Kelley, whose experience on legal drama includes everything from Ally McBeal to the more recent Big Little Lies – has been unafraid to follow its own path, dropping or amalgamating characters from the original Scott Turow novel and creating new subplots, arcs and twists. At times, it has felt less like an adaptation of Presumed Innocent and more a loose fantasia on its characters and basic storyline. Not that the 1990 Harrison Ford film was exactly a faithful take on the book; but that was, at least, the inevitable result of turning a 450-page novel into a two hour film.
The changes between the various versions are truly fascinating; some are obviously necessary – sexual politics have changed a huge amount in the past 35 years – while others are nearly inexplicable. Here are some of the biggest alterations between book, film and TV series, and some speculation as to why they might have taken place.
Who killed Carolyn – and how?
Every different version of Presumed Innocent ends in a different way. In the book, the killer is revealed to be Rusty’s wife Barbara, but he works out that she murdered Carolyn and confronts her with the truth, much to her horror. In the film, there is a long, sad scene in which, after Rusty is acquitted, Barbara confesses to the murder and tells Rusty that she wanted him to know that she did it in revenge for his affair, but did not anticipate him being charged with murder.
And in the series, it initially begins as it does in the book – Rusty confronting Barbara, who has also been given a subplot of a flirtatious relationship with a bartender that is nowhere to be found in either the book or film – and telling her that, seeing Carolyn’s dead body, he had the presence of mind to rearrange the corpse in a bondage position, so as to associate the killing with a previous murder case that he had prosecuted.
The series then takes on the grim twist that, in fact, Barbara did not commit the murder. It was their daughter Jaden, who killed Carolyn after she told her that she was pregnant with Rusty’s child. In all three versions, the crime goes unpunished, with the family unit together, but compromised forever by the knowledge of what has been done.
Who is Rusty Sabich?
In the film, there was never any serious doubt as to Rusty’s innocence because he was played by Harrison Ford (albeit with his worst-ever haircut) and Ford wore his usual worried expression throughout, suggesting that he had strayed from the proper path but not that he was a murderer.
The character in the original novel had more ambiguity to him, however; he narrates, which instinctively puts the reader on his side, but when he declares his obsession with Carolyn, saying “And then, when I’m by myself, I feel desperate and ashamed. This raging, mad obsession! Where is my world? I am departing. I am gone already”, the reader is alerted to the fact that the lawyer may be a more complex man than he originally appears.
Gyllenhaal’s Rusty is something else altogether. The actor has always thrived on playing morally complicated characters, rather than simple heroes, and his Rusty is someone with a hair-trigger temper whose apparent love for his wife and family (he has two children in the series, rather than the lone son of the novel) is put into perspective by his ready willingness to commit violence, most shockingly when he savagely beats Brian Ratzer – a character created for the series - up at the end of episode four when Ratzer comes to his home.
That this incarnation of Rusty is liable to fly off the handle – rather than the cooler, more sombre version that Ford played – is demonstrated particularly well during his courtroom cross-examination with Molto in episode seven, in which, confronted with video evidence of his beating Ratzer and testimony of his threatening medical examiner Herbert Kumagai, Rusty looks every inch a potential murderer. Yet the crucial difference in the series is that, rather than the trial collapsing, Rusty is acquitted by the jury: rightfully, given his innocence.
Farewell, Sandy Stern
One of the most likeable and charismatic characters in both the original novel and the film is Rusty’s defence attorney Alejandro ‘Sandy’ Stern, an Argentinean lawyer who proves himself to be a wily master of legal technicalities in court, systematically suggesting that his client has been framed by the new district attorney Nico Della Guardia – a former friend of Rusty’s who he has become estranged from due to their respective, all-consuming ambition – and ensuring that the case is thrown out by the unimpressed judge.
He was portrayed by the late, much-missed Raul Julia in the film, and when Rusty says that he’s going to need “a lawyer, a very, very good lawyer, an expensive lawyer”, the audience knows that a suave and charismatic figure will duly appear. Yet Kelley’s adaptation removed Sandy altogether, making Rusty’s mentor, the former district attorney Raymond Horgan, his defence lawyer, thereby intensifying the dynamic between the two men but losing the charming and brilliant character so brilliantly embodied by Julia on screen.
The ‘slut-shaming’ of Carolyn Polhemus
In the novel and the film, Carolyn, an assistant prosecuting attorney, is considerably younger than Rusty, leading to an inequality between them in status and power; although it is clear that their brief love affair ended a considerable time before she was murdered, Rusty remains obsessed by her, thus placing himself in pole position to be the prime suspect in her killing.
She is shown to be sexually promiscuous, seducing powerful men – including both Rusty and Horgan – for her own gratification and to further her own career, and then drops them as soon as she is bored of them or she has got what she has wanted. When she is discovered murdered in a bondage pose – and apparently raped – it feels like a classic example of slut-shaming. This was toned down to some degree in the film, with Greta Scacchi’s Carolyn less obviously opportunistic, but she still felt like an obvious femme fatale, and somehow deserving of her eventual fate.
The conception of Carolyn in the TV series is considerably different to how it was in the earlier versions. She is older – around Rusty’s age – and is married, with a teenage son, although estranged from her husband, as well as being a more peripheral but sympathetic character. It is Rusty who is depicted as unhealthily obsessed, all but stalking her over message and appearing at her house on the night that she is murdered.
One of Kelley’s queasier innovations is to suggest that her son, Michael, had a strange, quasi-sexual obsession with his mother, which puts him into the frame as a suspect – although the implication that, having murdered her, he would arrange her in a bondage position, is a deeply grim one. And one of the nastier twists is that she was pregnant, with Rusty’s child, meaning that he has a far better reason to murder her in a fit of passion than in the book or film.
Judge Lyttle – a gender switch and a character change
As played by Noma Dumezweni in the television series, Judge Lyttle – she is not given a Christian name – is the exemplar of a firm but fair judge, often exasperated by the showboating and legal pyrotechnics of both the prosecution and defence, and frequently moved to declare the whole proceedings as a mistrial and thereby allow the state either to retry Rusty on the lesser charge of manslaughter or drop the case altogether.
This is a far cry from the conception of Lyttle in both the original novel and the film, where the character – a man as originally written – was played by Paul Winfield. Rather than the example of rectitude that the judge is in the series, Lyttle is an altogether more flawed character who has himself been sexually involved with Polhemus, along, apparently, with virtually every member of the legal profession, and was therefore blackmailed by her when she became aware that he was responsible for taking bribes in order to drop cases.
Dumezweni is very fine in the role, perfectly conveying a sense of weary outrage but also intrinsic loyalty to Rusty, who she has had many professional dealings before, but the loss of this particular detail makes the judge a more two-dimensional character, as well as meaning that, rather than the case collapsing spectacularly because of Lyttle’s peccadilloes and being dismissed, it has to result in a verdict of not guilty, much to the disappointment of Sarsgaard’s vindictive Tommy Molto.
Where is Presumed Innocent set?
The series takes place in a grim-looking Chicago, where it seems to rain virtually all the time and where everyone looks deeply miserable; nonetheless, the city is a striking backdrop to the secrets of the heart and mind that are revealed over the course of the eight episodes.
Although Turow himself lived and practiced as an attorney in Chicago, making the use of the setting a logical one, the novel itself is not set there, but in the fictitious ‘Kindle County’, which bears some resemblances to Turow’s home town but is not an explicit representation of it. The film, meanwhile, was mainly shot in Detroit, and therefore loses something of the specificity of the setting that the TV version has.
What happens to Raymond Horgan?
One of the big cliffhangers in the series – something not present in either the book or film – comes when Raymond has what seems to be a heart attack in court, leading Rusty to jump in and frantically try to give him CPR in an attempt to save his life. The moment demonstrates that Rusty is a more complex figure than the easily riled brute that the prosecution wish to portray him as, capable of taking decisive, even heroic action when he is called upon.
And in Camp’s wonderfully rich and warm portrayal of Horgan, especially in his domestic scenes with his wife Lorraine (played, in a nice touch, by Camp’s real-life wife Elizabeth Marvel), he comes across as both the mentor and friend in adversity that we would all like to have. In the book and film, Horgan is still an avuncular figure, albeit compromised by his affair with Carolyn, but there is not the innate sense of the father-son relationship so lovingly acted by both Gyllenhaal and Camp in the series.