Presumed Innocent

Presumed Innocent directed Alan J. Pakula starring Harrison Ford, Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia, Paul Winfield, Bonnie Bedelia, and Greta Scacchi. 

What a cast list.  Most of them are character actors, but some of the best character actors there are.  Then you have Pakula directing them. How can this movie go wrong? It can't when you toss in a solid screenplay that I believe John Grisham has been trying to write for the last 20 years or so.

I don't know what I was fully expecting from this movie but I had a great time watching it and watching these solid actors chew on the dialogue given to them. There were so many scenes in this movie where the acting - backed up by a director who let his actors act without editing the scenes to death - was just so great I was glad to be watching this movie. 

I've got to admit there are a few genres I really like, sci-fi being the top of my list and a really good "who done it?" being a close second - this could stem from a deep childhood affection that has continued to grow over the years for Sherlock Holmes from reading the stories, watching the movies and TV shows. This movie is a solid "who done it?" that leaves no loose ends dangling when the movie ends and frankly the story was built so well it kept doing about faces as it progressed and heading in a completely different directions than I thought it was originally going, normally most movies don't do that to me. 

Some of the best scenes in this movie involve the family and the domestic life and how it's affected by the murder trial, these scenes of family life I felt really gave Ford's character some emotion and depth and pulled covers back on what a bastard he could be that's a brave screenplay to do that to the main character. Most of the emotion in this movie didn't feel forced but I felt it was clearly drawn from the screenplay, scenes, situations and characters so much so that it wasn't a normal cliched Hollywood screen play or charactrers, something every John Grisham books suffers from. 

And a lot of the courtroom scenes didn't seem like they were drowned in the courtroom cliches of surprise witnesses or surprise evidence. There were plenty of scenes where Ford had to check his ego and just stand there silent while the other actors acted around him, but it was believable when this happened because if his character had talked he risked damning himself, so silence was his only option.