Please welcome new contributor Catherine Springer
Sandra Bullock has something to prove. No matter how beloved she may be as a performer, she’s never really been taken seriously as a dramatic actress. Her Best Actress Oscar win for The Blind Side (2009) is widely considered to be one of the weakest, as many feel she won more as a nod to her popularity and successful career than for the performance itself. Bullock has always had a healthy perspective on herself and her career, and has taken all the criticism in stride. And yet, there must be a place deep inside that wants to prove to the world that she deserves her Oscar, and that she is so much more than the funny, affable girl next door.
Bullock’s starring role in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2013) went some of the way to proving she is more than the feel-good funny girl. But the question still remained: can Sandra Bullock deliver in a dramatic role, with no CGI or alien buffers? She's never truly played an unlikeable character, either. Can she change her brand this late in her career, and prove she can deliver in a serious and not loveable role?
The new Netflix film, The Unforgivable, proves the answer is an unequivocal yes. Unfortunately, few may hear that answer because anything she’s doing in this film that’s right is offset by everything else that is so, so wrong...
The Unforgiveable, directed by Nora Fingscheidt, is a drama based on a three-part British television series, Unforgiven, which aired in 2009. It tells the story of Ruth Slater (Bullock), a woman just released from prison after serving twenty years for killing a sheriff. Throughout the film, we see, through flashbacks, the circumstances of the shooting, and don’t truly understand the whole picture until the end of the film. But, for Ruth, the truth is irrelevant, because she will be labeled a cop-killer her whole life and she needs to find a way to cope with that. But Ruth’s first priority out of prison isn’t learning how to deal with life on the outside, it’s how to find her younger sister, Katie, who was put into the foster system when Ruth was sent to prison. Even though she’s been writing to Katie the whole time, she’s never gotten a response, so Ruth is desperate to find her, because Katie is all she has left in the world.
If it sounds like there’s really not a lot of plot there to sustain a two-hour film (or a three-part miniseries, for that matter), you would be right.
The Unforgiveable interested as interested in telling a story as much as dwelling on Ruth’s circumstances and selling us on the fact that she is tormented by her past, anguished by her present, and misjudged by the world. All she wants is to find her sister, we get it. We also get it that the world is against her. We also get that her sister, played by Aisling Franciosi, is happy and doing well with her adopted parents, played by Linda Emond and Richard Thomas. Three quarters of the film is exposition. While there’s nothing wrong with setting the stage, especially when there are different threads that eventually need to come together, it’s another thing to continue to tread the same ground, over and over. At a certain point, the story must move forward, but this one never does. It gets stuck in the mud, at a tortuously languid pace, and devotes too much time to flashbacks, and not even flashbacks that we can make anything of. What we get are flashes of flashback, pieces of a puzzle to put together.
It’s especially painful because Bullock does deliver a moving and powerful performance in a role we have never seen her in before. She challenges herself (and her audience) and comes through with a raw and rabid energy, a wounded animal who defends herself and doesn’t come even close to breaking down. Screenwriters Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz and Courtenay Miles do her character a true disservice by not giving her more room to grow, forcing her to essentially stand in place for two hours. Still, Bullock manages to find shade and texture in her character.
Bullock is not the only top-tier performer who gets lost in the morass of this script. Emond and Thomas are relegated to protective parent tropes, while Vincent D’Onofrio and Viola Davis of all people are truly not much more than window dressing, wasted as superfluous characters that don’t contribute much at all. Every character is a cliché, written in to paint a picture, not serve a story. Jon Bernthal does get a character with some potential but then he disappears as quickly as he arrives.
Wasted potential is the key takeaway from The Unforgiveable, as it has a great cast and seemingly rich source material, but the approach is riddled with bad choices, resulting in a morbidly slow exercise in dramatic futility that even Sandra Bullock cannot save, despite her many talents that do, yes, include serious acting. She did deserve her Oscar. She also deserves something better than The Unforgiveable.