Scott Turow is an amazing writer because of his ability to give full, rich, textured lives to most of the characters in a book. In his fictional world of Kindle county, even the peripheral figures have great,textured back-stories. He has great insight into human nature. It's too bad that you can see almost none of this in the TV movie version of Innocent.
I watched this movie shortly after reading the book. The book was fascinating and absorbing. While the movie was competently made, it lacked most of the detail that makes Turow's books so rich and interesting. The recorded version of the book is 14 hours long, and none of that time was wasted or boring. The movie was probably less than 90 minutes, if you take out the commercial breaks. There was no way for them to compress so much character development and plot into such a small space. And in my opinion, it was wrong to try.
Unfortunately, though the movie isn't awful, I can't think of any reason to recommend it. There are some good performances, but the script is just too skeletal to do justice to this story.
I hope that the next time Scott Turow gets an movie offer on one of his great books, that he holds out for a miniseries instead.
