Who are these characters? Why should we care about them, or at least care enough to spend two hours with them? These are fundamental questions any filmmaker should start with before endeavoring to make a film. And, yet it’s these very questions that director Nora Fingscheidt and her three screenwriters Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz and Courtenay Miles never seemed to have answered before they began work on the new Sandra Bullock starring Netflix film “The Unforgivable.”
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Based on the 2009 British miniseries of the same name by Sally Wainwright (“Gentleman Jack”), we’re introduced to Ruth Slater (Bullock) as she prepares to leave prison in an opening sequence montage filled with an excessive amount of quick cuts. We get her hands packing up a cell, then to a man throwing something in a bonfire, then more hands, then a blurry flashback, then a tattoo on hands, then horses, then a girl screaming, then some letters signed love Ruth. It’s nearly five minutes of this whirlwind of seemingly unconnected images and sounds before we see Bullock’s face as she exits the prison gates. At the same time a woman named Katherine (Aisling Franciosi) zones out while driving, runs a red light and we get a smash cut to the title.
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Ruth is out on parole early for good behavior, having served twenty years for the murder of a sheriff. We quickly learn that the man by the bonfire is one of the sheriff’s two grown-up sons, Steve (Will Pullen) and Keith (Tom Guiry), angry over her early release. Katherine, we learn, is Ruth’s baby sister who was five when the murder occurred and went into the foster system after her imprisonment.
Rob Morgan is not given much to do as Ruth’s cliche parole officer Vince other than looking stern and giving lectures. Much of the film it felt like he was doing his best riff on Tommy Lee Jones in “Double Jeopardy.” In fact, there are several plot beats – and even its Washington State setting – that feel like cheap copies of that late-90s thriller. If only the filmmakers had borrowed its verve as well.
Bullock’s Ruth is a broken woman. Broken by the incident that sent her to prison, but also spiritually broken by incarceration. This is one of various themes the film could have explored in-depth, but with so many plot lines and characters to juggle, it never gets the time to dig in. Yet, it also does its best to completely other those who have gone through the system from Ruth, just as she’s othered from the rest of society. When the camera lingers on the squalor and women’s bodies as she enters the halfway house where she’s set to live, it feels voyeuristic and frankly judgemental of the other ex-cons. When Blake (Jon Bernthal, who somehow is the only actor who manages to breathe life into his character), Ruth’s co-worker at her fishery job, discovers she is an ex-con at first, he rejects. Later when we discover the root of his aversion it feels like another wasted opportunity to explore a broken system.
Eventually, Ruth visits the farmhouse where she lived with her sister. It’s now of course occupied by a lawyer named John (an empathetic Vincent D’Onofrio), who Ruth talks into helping him track down her sister’s adoptive parents (Linda Emond, Richard Thomas). His wife Liz (Viola Davis), however shares the same judgemental feeling towards Ruth when she discovers her crime. Davis always brings gravitas to her roles, but that heft can’t save the misguided way her character is used. She’s given an utterly hamfisted monologue comparing how the system treated Ruth to what would have happened to her sons in the same situation. While it is refreshing for a film even to acknowledge this double standard, the manner in which it’s jammed into an already overstuffed film feels opportunistic and icky rather than poignant or profound. Only later, when the big twist is revealed, Liz treats Ruth like a human being. As if learning she’s not like other ex-cons suddenly makes her worthy of empathy again.
Audiences have likely guessed the twist long before the reveal, so what should be an impactful emotional moment just feels awkward and deflated. Not only does the film spend so little time filling in the intimacy of the relationship between the two sisters in its myriad of flashbacks, the age difference between Bullock and Franciosi makes the whole plot line make very little sense. It seems as though Ruth should have been a teen when Katherine was five, yet three decades separate the two actresses. The urgency of the situation that led to the murder is far less impactful if Ruth was 35 than if she were, say, 19.
This could maybe have been overcome if we spent more time with either woman, but unfortunately the film also follows Steve and Keith as they stalk Ruth, and eventually plot revenge. But even this thread becomes overly convoluted as the brothers are entangled in their own family drama, a section of the film that devolves into a giant pile on of unpleasantries.
The film’s dull beige color palette and overly trite string score help only to underscore the largely one-note performances from what should h+ave been a promising ensemble cast. By keeping the film’s emotional core at a distance for most of the film, the only catharsis the audience feels during its denouement is from the relief that this bleak, miserable slog is finally over. [C-]
