Innocent

Scott Turow is an amazing writer because of his ability to give full, rich, textured lives to most of the characters in a book. In his fictional world of Kindle county, even the peripheral figures have great,textured back-stories. He has great insight into human nature. It's too bad that you can see almost none of this in the TV movie version of Innocent.

I watched this movie shortly after reading the book. The book was fascinating and absorbing. While the movie was competently made, it lacked most of the detail that makes Turow's books so rich and interesting. The recorded version of the book is 14 hours long, and none of that time was wasted or boring. The movie was probably less than 90 minutes, if you take out the commercial breaks. There was no way for them to compress so much character development and plot into such a small space. And in my opinion, it was wrong to try.

Unfortunately, though the movie isn't awful, I can't think of any reason to recommend it. There are some good performances, but the script is just too skeletal to do justice to this story.

I hope that the next time Scott Turow gets an movie offer on one of his great books, that he holds out for a miniseries instead.

A glaring omission that should have been present in all movies involving Barbara is the fact that Barbara is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. There's no research showing mentally ill people who can act normal for years and work as a teacher without doing something to attract attention if not legal problems.

This is an efficient movie with some neat twists and turns in the solving of a crime. It is largely inoffensive because it is constructed to the well worn formula of finger pointing to a murderer and then seeing just how many things can change your mind before the credits roll.

The acting is reasonable but not sensational with the victim, Barbara (Marcia Gay Harden), being the best at everything in the back story played out throughout the film. Nothing sticks out as faulty, but it is not especially memorable either.

If you like courtrooms and enjoy trying to work crimes out then it is worth a rental.

This movie is a essentially a T. V Movie but with a good cast. However the cast is good this movie suffers from a number of problems.

Firstly the editing of this movie is quite bad. The pacing of this movie is so quick that as a viewer the movie takes you from scene to scene without having a moment for certain scenes to breath and allow the audience to take stock of what has happened. As the story is nonlinear with the use of flashbacks, the editing choices used can slightly confuse things.

Another problem is that the dialogue between characters can feel clunky at times (I am thinking of a couple interactions between Richard Schiff and Tahmoh Penikett).

However I find the biggest problem with this movie is the score. The score is too overbearing at times and can be distraction.

It's a real shame that producers of this movie were able to cast a few good Actors but completely undercut that by being unable to deliver on a technical front.

Judge Rusty Sabich (Bill Pullman) is found with his dead wife Barbara (Marcia Gay Harden) in their bed. He didn't report it for 24 hours and suspicion mounts against him. D.A. Tommy Molto (Richard Schiff) reluctantly allows Jimmy Brand to investigated despite the possibility of another humiliation from a Rusty case. A year earlier is his 60th birthday. There is tension below the surface of his perfect job, their perfect marriage, and perfect family. His clerk Anna Vostick provokes accusation of infidelity. There is a good reason for the accusation and a previous affair led to a big media trial.

This movie needs to be Molto's movie. The audience needs to know only what Molto knows. The audience needs to learn what Molto learns. The computer thing needs to be more clearly explained. I get the explanation but it needs to be physically shown. I'm not a Scott Turow reader. I'm not sure how he attacks the story but I'd definitely make Molto the protagonist. This is messy and the Sabich family is not appealing. The most compelling section is the D.A. group come up with Barbara's revenge premise.