Word: pakula
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Still, there's hope for those who have already ruined the summer's best drama for themselves. No matter how vividly you have acted out the book's story in your mind, chances are that the director, Alan J. Pakula, and cast of players have done it better in this movie...
Directed by Alan J. Pakula...
...book is also the kind of material Alan J. Pakula was put on earth to direct. Klute, The Parallax View and All the President's Men are all marvelously intricate visions in which otherwise quite knowing individuals are slowly forced to the awareness that they are being victimized -- no, terrorized -- by other people's unscrupulous rage to maintain respectable order at any cost. Yet conscientiously as this movie has been made, it does not work as well as the novel did or as some of Pakula's other films have...
Conscientiousness may, indeed, be part of the problem. In converting the story of Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford), a public prosecutor forced by circumstantial evidence and local political imperatives to stand trial for the murder of Carolyn Polhemus (Greta Scacchi), an upper-slutty colleague, Pakula seems overawed by the book's critical and popular success. Whatever its other virtues, Presumed Innocent was basically a page turner; the movie is a slow burner...
This defense might as well rest; the prosecution has a watertight case. In fact, the imaginary charges against Scott Frederic Turow, 41, may not go far enough. They ignore, for example, the $20 million film version of Presumed Innocent, directed by Alan Pakula and starring Harrison Ford, which will be released this summer and will probably lure every Turow fan who is not still hiding from job and loved ones while reading The Burden of Proof...