Suzie Miller’s award-winning 2019 play Prima Facie employs a familiar narrative device: a hotshot London barrister finds herself on the other side of the bar, subject to the very legal tactics she once so ruthlessly employed. Not as a defendant, but as the accuser in a rape case.
We’ve seen versions of this before – a powerful figure suddenly caught in a struggle against a system they helped perpetuate – but Miller’s play distinguishes itself by putting the onus on to one actor.
The wonder of Prima Facie is not really its narrative acuity nor its urgent point-making but the breathless and prodigious effort of its performer – most famously a magnificent, tireless Jodie Comer in London and New York.
How could a traditional film hold its focus on one monologuing person for nearly two hours? A rare few have tried that but most financiers and producers seem to think that it might be a good idea to have a few more cast members.
And thus the fate of Prima Facie, which Miller and the director, Susanna White, have turned into a cinematic vehicle for Cynthia Erivo. Unlike Comer, Erivo has to share the space with other people and must perform in real time what was, on stage, only recollection. In doing so, much of the exciting punch of Prima Facie has been washed away; what remains is a fairly conventional treatise on a pervasive societal ill.
Erivo plays Tessa, a criminal defense lawyer who is quickly gaining a reputation around the Old Bailey for her wily cunning in pleading her clients’ innocence. She is assigned a lot of sex crimes cases because, as a colleague glumly sums up, it looks good for a man accused of rape to have a female attorney arguing on his behalf.
Tessa doesn’t seem to mind; she is simply providing the defense to which everyone is entitled. Morality has no place in the equation, she coolly figures.
Tessa is perhaps especially driven because she is trying to transcend humble beginnings. Her mother, June (Noma Dumezweni), works as a cleaner, while her younger brother, Johnny (Toheeb Jimoh), is in construction. Tessa was clever enough to get a scholarship to Cambridge and now lives a flashy, important life in London, stylish Thames-adjacent apartment and all.
All of that momentum is horribly disrupted when Tessa is raped by a colleague and lover, Julian (Daniel Ings), a terrible, frightening violation that punctuates what had been a lovely “are we getting serious?” date. Tessa reports to the police and thus sets herself on course for a trial, during which her motives and character will be intensely scrutinized on the way to a likely acquittal. That is just the way things tend to work, a fact Tessa understands all too well. But she goes ahead anyway, trying to rescue some sense of justice from this awful mess.
In the play, the actor playing Tessa gets to wax long and rhapsodic on what she loves about the law, describing with relish the minute strategies of cross-examination and reveling in the sport of it all. That actor also has ample time to explicate what is happening inside Tessa’s head: the agonizing doubt, the anger, the fear, the bewilderment that she has become the figure she once easily dismantled in court.
Miller and White throw in a little of that internal monologue but sparingly enough that it comes across as merely a half-hearted gimmick. We never get too deep with Tessa, which turns her story into something far more generic than I think the film-makers intended.
It does not help matters that White films everything so flatly, with only the occasional attempt to add some visual texture to the proceedings.
Erivo approaches the role with a focused rigor and yet she oddly doesn’t have all that much to play. Perhaps part of the problem is that the film makes a three-year time jump from the police report to the trial, which means we’ve no time to sit in the long fallout of the incident, to watch Erivo evolve her characterization as Tessa passes through the crucible of processing what has happened to her. The film becomes quite procedural, slowing down for a long recounting of what we just saw; an Olivier-winning play somehow reduced to Law & Order blandness.
Of course, the film’s messaging – about the boggling frequency of sexual assault, about the vexing and myriad struggles of bringing perpetrators to justice – is well worth issuing out. And yet, White delivers all that in far too blunt a fashion. One sorely misses the darkly engrossing journey of the play’s performance, its energetic peaks, its shattering valleys, its spiky humor. All that has been bowdlerized in favor of something far more straightforward and thin.
In expanding its view beyond one woman and the fire of her personal testimony, Prima Facie makes itself not universal but frustratingly anodyne.
