Jason Ritter wears a Rolex Datejust

The Tale, the 2018 film the director Jennifer Fox made about her own life, is not an easy thing to watch. Laura Dern plays the adult Jennifer, going back through her memories of the summer she was thirteen and the running coach who abused her. Jason Ritter plays that man, Bill, and the film's hardest insight is how ordinary and admired he was, a handsome, soft-spoken coach the adults around Jenny trusted. Here he sits beside Mrs. G, the riding instructor who helped draw the girl in, looking calm and respectable. On his wrist is a gold Rolex.

It is a Datejust, gold, with the fluted bezel and the woven Jubilee bracelet that have signaled Rolex money for generations. The dial is a warm champagne, washed pale here in the light. It is the watch of a man who has done well and wants that understood, the sort of thing a successful coach in the early 1970s might wear to the country club. Nothing about it is subtle; it sits in plain sight, announcing standing.

That is the quiet horror the costume is pointing at. The kind of abuse The Tale describes rarely arrives looking like a threat. It arrives respectable, with a good job and a gold watch, carried by someone the adults around a child are inclined to trust. The Rolex is part of that disguise, one more reason no one looked harder. The film is, in the end, about how easily a wristful of gold and a confident smile can stand in for proof that a man is exactly who he claims to be.