PLOT: A woman struggles with re-entering society after 20 years behind bars for the murder of a cop, all while trying to get back into contact with her sister.
REVIEW: We’re living in an age of film and TV where it’s perfectly par for the course to watch a movie and wonder if it should’ve been a miniseries, or watch a miniseries and wonder if it should’ve been a movie. Cases can be made for the former when it would’ve been better to expand on characters and themes across a few more hours, or the latter when it would’ve been beneficial to chop away the fat for a more focused result. But what can certainly never be acceptable is whatever is going on in The Unforgivable, a movie based on a miniseries, and one that seemingly tried to throw all the ingredients of the source material into less than two hours, losing sight of most of its characters and themes, leaving in its place is a vacant slog that never has the pathos to fulfill the redemption arc at its core.
Based on the 2009 British miniseries Unforgiven, the movie from director Nora Fingscheidt centers on Ruth Slater (Sandra Bullock), a woman who has spent the last 20 years in prison for killing a cop (W. Earl Brown) during an incident wherein people were trying to evict her and her young sister from their family home. A story about a woman trying to re-enter society while hiding the Scarlet Letter that is “Cop Killer” and simultaneously trying to get back into contact with her now-grown sister (Aisling Franciosi) taken in by a foster family, there are foundations here for a captivating drama.
Playing a bit against type, Bullock is stoic and guarded as Ruth, pushing away everyone around her and prone to a bit of violence if someone else tries to step up on her. Her inability to connect with anyone else in the outside world is a combination of her years behind bars and her fears of opening up to someone about what she did. On top of it all, she has nightmares of the event that got her locked up, and can only really think about her sister and hope she’s okay. There’s a setup here for a rich examination of what it means for a prisoner to re-enter the world and yet still have to be seen as nothing but a criminal. As well, the sons of the man she killed (Will Pullen, Tom Guiry) are out for revenge, representing a cyclical nature of violence which, all together, could’ve made for a rewarding story about forgiveness and redemption.
But bogging all that potential greatness is a parade of subplots and characters played by veterans like Viola Davis, Jon Bernthal, and Vincent D’Onofrio who are either criminally underused or have to fit into a one-dimensional archetype of the redemption drama. D’Onofrio and Davis play a husband and wife living in the old Slater home, and the former, a lawyer, is trying to now help Ruth see her sister again. While their early scenes have some promise, soon they are lost in the shuffle of everyone else and everything going on without them. They are trapped in the legal drama section of the movie and have nothing to do with the character study, revenge drama, or even romantic subplots. Bernthal fills that role in the latter, and while he does fine work also against type as an almost silly, innocent co-worker who takes a liking to Ruth, his dynamic with her is far too predictable as the love interest who has to break through her barriers.
This is all also to say that Unforgivable feels like several movies stacked on top of each other, each with their own characters who all only have Ruth in common, and none of them manage to be terribly compelling. Aside from the flashing images of “That Day” that go on in Ruth’s mind, there’s zero emotional heft or throughline that gives her an interesting arc worth investing in, which makes her time bouncing between jobs feel stale far too quickly, and the story lost before it begins. We know Ruth wants to see her sister again, but because there are so many other aspects of the story to drag her through, most of the time we’re spent with her is stalled in a banal routine. As a result, Ruth’s journey doesn’t offer much reason to care if she can actually move on or not. Much of this points to the script from Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz, Courtenay Miles, which seems to be trying to capture all the elements that could possibly come with a character like Ruth trying to re-enter society and move on with her life, that it forget to zero-in on the strongest element and tell a singular, compelling story.
Through it all, Bullock is a saving grace, showing a darker side of herself that relies more on physicality than working with dialogue, and even if nothing in the story is enough to keep your attention, she’s doing the work to keep you on board. Even against the constantly grey skies of the Seattle setting, which leaves Fingscheidt no room to make the movie at least look good visually, Bullock’s always giving off something on-screen to keep your eye on. And even as wasted as they are, the rest of the ensemble, including Franciosi as the sister that doesn’t seem to have a major role to play despite being the main character’s key focus, is too professional to not do their best with what they got.
But as the final act kicks off and veers into full-blown action-thriller territory that is damn-near laughable at times, the only thing I was left with remembering was all the waste. Every nugget of a great story is watered down to make getting to every other equally dull angle all the easier, and a great Bullock performance is wasted in a movie that doesn’t find a way to make the best use of her. Perhaps you too will see all the ways this adaptation of a longer miniseries were potentially crammed in, ultimately proving that just because something worked on the screen once, doesn’t mean it will ever again.