Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Unforgivable’ on Netflix, a Depressing Melodrama Starring an Anti-Glam Sandra Bullock as an Ex-con

Netflix movie The Unforgivable adapts 2009 British TV miniseries Unforgiven into a Sandra Bullock anti-glam vehicle, giving the star an opportunity to play against type. She exhibits some Very Serious Acting: She plays an ex-con. She doesn’t wear makeup. Her hair is unkempt. She doesn’t smile for two hours. Are there flashbacks to That Fateful Day? Oh boy, are there flashbacks. They’re just more opportunities for the star – known for lighthearted comedies and big Hollywood showcases like The Blind Side – to Show Her Range, but does she make the most of them? Is she convincing as a hardened and weathered woman with jailhouse tats on her hands? Let’s find out.

THE UNFORGIVABLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Today, Ruth Slater (Bullock) is getting released from prison. As she packs her stuff, we see bleary images from the past, memory fragments, of guns, screaming, a little girl. So yes, already with the flashbacks. She doesn’t seem to be all that happy to be getting out. Her parole officer lectures her and warns her and gives her a contact for a job at a seafood packing plant and drops her off at a halfway house where all the residents are constantly shouting or shooting smack. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Katherine (Aisling Franciosi) is driving, but isn’t quite keeping her mind on the road. She seems distracted, not by her phone or a billboard or something happening on the street, but, like, by a thought, such as, oh, maybe an old repressed memory or something, and she runs a red and, bang, ends up in the hospital with cuts and bruises and a concussion and an arm in a sling, and she’s thankful, because it could’ve been worse.

Is it a coincidence that Ruth’s release and Katherine’s crash happen on the same day? I THINK NOT. The screenplay gods surely want there to be some psychic extranatural jive going on here, because, see, they’re sisters, long estranged. Katherine was five when her somewhat significantly older sister went to prison for killing a police officer with a shotgun. The kid was adopted by a nice couple, Michael (Richard Thomas, a.k.a. John Boy from The Waltons) and Rachel (Linda Emond), and raised with a younger sister, Emily (Emma Nelson). The parents are stable, and the girls seem pretty tight; Emily is in high school and Katherine is a gifted pianist attending, I dunno, music college? She has little memory of what happened, except maybe she actually does. “Are you having those nightmares again?” Emily asks Katherine, and this is precisely how sisters talk when one was traumatized at a very young age and the other apparently wants to be a psychotherapist.

There’s another meanwhile here, regarding brothers Steve (Will Pullen) and Keith Whelan (Tom Guiry), whose lives also were shattered that fateful day; their father was the police officer, and their bitterness and rage are stoked when they hear Ruth got out early for good behavior. It also seems as if the cops, some of whom stalk Ruth and stare her down from their cruisers, have given these boys a get-out-of-jail-free card if they want to do something about it. At this point, it’s worth noting that none of these characters seem to have undergone any sort of counseling, or if they have, it didn’t work very well. They’re all screwed up, not like all of us are screwed up to various degrees – such is the reality of the human condition, you know – but Movie Screwed Up, which means they’re about to make a lot of really dumb decisions in order to advance the plot.

Hold tight, because here comes a third meanwhile. In a rural farmhouse that happens to be the rural farmhouse where Ruth and Katherine used to live, lives Liz (Viola Davis) and John Ingram (Vincent D’Onofrio) and their two sons. Ruth buses out there one day and stares at the house until John invites her in, while Liz gives him a Viola Davis Look of Severe, Silent Disapproval. Wouldn’t you know, John’s a lawyer who does pro bono work, which is exactly what Ruth needs in order to work around a no-contact order and possibly see her sister. Her mopey, hardened, coarse, lonely, joyless, cold, vinegary, irreconcilable, gruff, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, can’t-rest life can’t go on without Katherine, to whom she wrote “thousands” of letters over the years. She never got a letter in return, not even once.

When Ruth’s not pining like acres upon acres of Christmas trees, she works two jobs, building walls at a community center and beheading fish in a factory, where she meets Blake (Jon Bernthal), a chatty fella who’s apparently drawn to the sullen, silent, tactless, shooting-knives-from-her-eyes type. He even sneaks up on her at the construction site and she nearly brains him with a pipe wrench, and the doughnuts he brought her just totally go flying. Yes, there’s another character to keep track of here, I mean, how many CHARACTERS does a movie NEED? There’s a lot going on here, just tons of stuff, tons of it, all jammed in and working its way to a big conclusion where even more stuff happens in one fateful day, all cross-cut with flashbacks to the other fateful day. Just how fateful is all this going to get? Can’t say without spoilin’ it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: There’s so much corny, overheated, basic-cable melodrama here, I wanted to rename the movie Tyler Perry’s Just Got Outta Prison.

Performance Worth Watching: You know, it feels like Viola Davis is just not having any of this crap.

Memorable Dialogue: “Life goes on.” – Ruth says this, but it’s really not true for anyone in this movie

Sex and Skin: A very brief shot of extramarital coitus interruptus, because there must’ve been a point where the screenwriters felt like they hadn’t crammed everything that exists into this story, so they wedged in a single, eminently cuttable scene that reveals a secondary character’s troubled home life in order to further justify the stupid decisions that secondary character makes.

Our Take: In this world, there are things that need to be said about redemption and forgiveness, punishment and rehabilitation, The System, the gray areas of morality, psychic trauma and mental illness, protecting the vulnerable vs. exposing them to reality, siblinghood and parenthood, isolation and reintegration, and maybe whether doughnuts can fly. But alas, all these ideas are naught but flies at The Unforgivable’s picnic, pesky things to be swatted away lest it be about anything but its plot. Its sullen, ridiculous, burnt-to-a-crisp plot, which piles up preposterous incredulities and eye-rolling coincidences that might be amusing if they weren’t so damn predictable. Or maybe they’re amusing because they’re predictable? Hard to tell.

The film has opportunities to be interesting, in Ruth’s scarlet-letter story – she’ll always be a cop killer, her parole officer reminds her – and the debate over whether Katherine’s life would be better or worse with Ruth in it (although the movie suggests, with all the conviction of a serial Psych 101 class-skipper, that ending “those nightmares” for Katherine may be as simple as pressing the missing puzzle piece into place). It’s a solid premise, but the execution is terrible, just terrible. The first half of the film is generally OK, driven by Sandra Bullock’s glowering and gritty anti-Sandra Bullock performance. But it soon drenches us with Hollywood hogwash, bungling along, battering us with happenstance, pointless complications, drawn-out hokum, persistent flashbacks, enough characters and subplots for four movies, a howler of a third-act revelation and the type of overblown melodramatic flourishes that make Douglas Sirk films look like the Three Stooges. I didn’t buy any of it. Feel free to quote the movie’s title right back in its face.

Our Call: SKIP IT. No thank you!

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream The Unforgivable on Netflix