THE STORY – A brilliant defense lawyer exposes how the legal system betrays victims of sexual assault when she becomes one herself.
THE CAST – Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Ings, Noma Dumezweni, Toheeb Jimoh, Elizabeth Dulau, Harry Treadaway, Khalid Abdalla, Elliot Levey, Simon Russell-Beale & Sarah Junillon
THE TEAM – Susanna White (Director) & Suzie Miller (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 109 Minutes
Suzie Miller’s play “Prima Facie” gets the cinematic treatment. The film by the same name, written by Miller, directed by Susanna White, and starring Cynthia Erivo as a brilliant young defense barrister, just had its World Premiere at TIFF. And while Erivo gives it her all and the story’s message is urgent and poignant, the vehicle chosen to deliver the message is at odds with itself. It is, prima facie, i.e., on its face, difficult to understand, rendering the message far less powerful than it otherwise would have been in a different context.
Young Tessa Essler is an upcoming defense barrister in one of England’s oldest courts. She is brilliant and witty, slicing and dicing prosecution witnesses as a cunning and canny defense lawyer. She aptly describes that procedure as a game, but also as hunting prey. She circles and haunts victims and revictimizes them anew to destroy their credibility and get the bad guys off. This includes, in the opening scenes, a man accused of assault during a bar fight, as well as a defendant accused of rape. Tessa is also conspicuously aware of her profession’s difficult circumstances. She is Black and from a poor, working class background. Her colleagues and adversaries are privileged from the get go. She describes them and then imagines them as thoroughbred horses, ready to run the spring. In one of the first warning signs that “Prima Facie” is trying to cover too broad a landscape at a higher artistic plane, images of beautiful horses appear in slow motion, a moniker that will be abandoned for the entire rest of the 109 minute runtime until near the end.
At work, Tessa fraternizes with handsome colleague Julian (Daniel Ings) and the two start dating. For nearly the first half of the film, we see a rom-com. Their beautiful bodies and apartments intertwine and the smattering of troubles at home – mostly a difficult brother about to have a baby and a contemptuous mother – are given short shrift. Life is great for Tessa and the film feels like a nice episode of “Brothers & Sisters.” One night, after a date and consensual sex, Julian rapes Tessa. It is not ambiguous or a close call – he criminally assaults her, despite her clear and unequivocal refusal. Tessa runs to the police and decides to go public, despite the threats to her career and reputation. Years later, in the film’s third act, the matter goes to trial and Tessa is forced to testify, now the pawn in the game she used to control.
The film’s message is unambiguous and reveals a terrible truth. The legal system, which attempts to mete out justice by having people uncover some “truth,” is not “fit for purpose” when it comes to sexual assault. One critical reason is that, in addition to societal skepticism of women (including by women, as the film points out) and permissiveness toward men, the legal system attempts to find truth based on memory – an inherently unreliable thing when someone has been the victim of sexual assault. This poignant and urgent message is true from top to bottom and, if “Prima Facie” does anything well, it tells audiences who may not understand this subtle point of its urgency.
The problem is that the vehicle the script selects to deliver this message strains credulity. Tessa exploited this very flaw in the legal system for years and is a brilliant lawyer. The conceit that she would not understand this instinctively is difficult to square. In the real world, where this film tries to live, most people self-select into roles that put them out of the way of having to aid that system by, say, defending the very assaulters that the system abets. To be sure, other people make a different choice, but no one within the legal system does not understand it.
Despite all this, Erivo delivers a confident performance that is far more credible than the material she is handed. She is almost acting within acting – she knows that as a female lawyer of color she must demonstrate restraint that her other colleagues do not. Juries, judges, and her own colleagues are silently skeptical of her, but they also expect Tessa’s confidence and conviction as a lawyer. Erivo straddles this impossibly thin line marvelously, and when the movie’s tone shifts dramatically from rom-com to legal procedural she maintains her steady hand. The incessant voiceovers that Miller hands her keep trying to get in her way, but Erivo handles them deftly, too. The audience will be distracted and confused, but she remains unfazed. In all, it is a quiet, almost subdued performance, but one that rises above the shortcomings surrounding her.
That is the frustrating thing about “Prima Facie.” Everything it wants to say is correct, and much of it needs to be said loudly and often. The legal system is not built to understand sexual assault, much less deliver meaningful justice for it, and Erivo’s performance gives that indictment real force. But the film mistakes the righteousness of its argument for the persuasiveness of its drama. Its message is urgent, its lead performance is memorable, and yet the movie around both is too ungainly, too obvious, and too strained to earn the power it plainly wants. To strain the double entendre once more “Prima Facie” is, on its face, deeply unsatisfying.
