Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/26/10
Some
true stories get filmed and make you say “That's pretty interesting.”
Others ratchet it up to “Wow, I'm pretty amazed.” And still others
go all the way to “Holy crap, I really can't believe that happened.”
Such a tale is told by Tony Goldwyn's Conviction, which follows
Betty Anne Waters for two decades as she gets her GED, a Master's degree
in Education and then a law degree all so she can represent her wrongfully
convicted brother in his attempt to get out of prison. Goldwyn and
writer Pamela Gray, who put in eight of her own years bringing the story
to the screen, sense the improbability of all this and the ease with which
it could veer into absurd levels of melodrama and instead offer us an uncommonly
understated inspirational story. Mounted with extreme emotional authenticity
by a superb cast led by Hilary Swank as Waters, Conviction hits
very few false notes in its depiction of life at an economic strata rarely
glimpsed by the movies: the one where it's very, very easy to end
up in prison for someone else's crime.
It's
1980 in Ayer, Massachusetts, and Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) has overcome
a difficult childhood to start her own family with her new husband Rick
(Loren Dean). Her charming brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) hasn't been
quite so lucky: he's a trouble magnet, and whenever there's a crime
in Ayer, the police bring him in for questioning. Upon the murder
of one Katharina Brow, whose house he and Betty Anne broke into when they
were kids, leading to them being taken away from their mother, Kenny is
more than a casual suspect to arresting officer Nancy Taylor (Melissa Leo).
But he's got an alibi, and it seems nothing will come of the charges before
two former girlfriends (Clea DuVall and Juliette Lewis) come forward with
testimony that he confessed the killing to them. The trial goes badly,
and Kenny is sentenced to life in prison. Betty Anne follows the
appeals until they run out, and then Kenny tries to kill himself in prison.
In exchange for his promise not to try again, she proposes a bold plan.
She'll get her GED and then start college, working her way toward a Law
Degree that will allow her to become his lawyer and resume the fight for
his innocence. It takes over a decade, but when Betty Anne passes
the bar, she and law school friend Abra Rice (Minnie Driver) start digging
for the evidence from the original trial. It seems that while Kenny
rotted in prison, lawyers like The Innocence Project's Barry Scheck (Peter
Gallagher) have been using something called DNA to test old evidence to
prove, rather than suspect, whose blood was found at crime scenes.
But the evidence is said to have been destroyed years before, and it will
take a relentless search to even hope to uncover a sample of that all-important
blood. Even if she finds it, that's just the first step to set her
brother free, but Betty Anne Waters did not spend twelve years studying
to become a lawyer to give up the fight.
Yeah,
yeah, everybody SAYS they're all about family and would do anything for
their kin, but Betty Anne Waters walked that walk to an almost inconceivable
degree not so much because her sacrifices for her brother were so dramatic,
but because they involved so much methodical, mundane hard work.
Dramatizing this struggle is tricky precisely because her triumph was made
up of hundreds of thousands of tiny victories over a decade, and Conviction
decides the best way to do it is by going all in on the mundane, showing
how sticking with the grind of this monumental task cost her on a personal
level and buoyed her on a personal one. There's no better actress
than Swank at capturing the dignity of downtrodden working class heroes,
and what makes her performance as Betty Anne sing is how she captures the
single-mindedness that must have been necessary to do what she did.
There's never a second of doubt in her brother's innocence no matter what
else he might have done, and while it's clearly all she can do to keep
believing herself capable of becoming a lawyer, it's the only choice she
has to stick by him. On more than one occasion, the film confronts
her with others who clearly believe she's been a fool to do so much on
the basis of pure faith in the innocence of a man who's always in trouble,
and her reaction always tells the same story: this is a woman who
couldn't imagine having done it any other way.
Goldwyn
has placed most of Conviction's weight on the backs of his actors
and they deliver the goods. Rockwell nails the contradiction
at Kenny's heart, that he can be an amazingly funny, loving guy one second
and the next make you want to slap him in the face for being such an idiot.
And while none of the movie's women really ages convincingly during the
tale's 18-year span, you can see the years weigh on him more and more over
time. Leo is stunningly humorless, and not without cause as Kenny's
poor treatment of her is one of those things that makes you want to smack
him. Driver has that great way (best used in her Oscar-nominated
Good Will Hunting performance) of seeming like she's not one of
the common folk, but fits in with them quite nicely. Lewis and DuVall
are stunningly deglamorized, and seem like Jerry Springer guests
who must get told they vaguely resemble some actress or other all the time.
And Ari Graynor is quietly effective as Kenny's daughter, who must try
to come to terms with the fact that nothing she grew up believing about
her father is true.
And
then there's Gallagher, in the movie's (fact-based) surreal detour from
reality into celebrity. While Conviction informs us a couple
times that Barry Scheck is famous, it never does get around to telling
us what for. But pretty much anyone watching the news fifteen years
ago remembers him as part of O.J. Simpsons' improbably successful defense
at his murder trial. No matter how many good works Scheck and the
Innocence Project perform, his incongruous participation in that trial
will probably lead his obituary. So it's a bit surprising and certainly
novel to see him turn up here doing what he's spent the other 99% of his
career doing: Gallagher wisely keeps the impersonation to a minimum,
doing his best to keep his character from seeming too out of place in his
own story.
Most
filmmakers would amp up the sentiment in a way Goldwyn never does:
the more dramatic its developments, the more quiet Conviction gets.
I appreciated the lack of fireworks and gospel choirs, because the bulk
of the criminal justice system's work is just like this, a quiet assembly
line we hope carries the guilty to justice and the innocent to safety.
But even when it's the opposite, the gears don't grind any louder.
Much
has been written about the events that happened to Kenny Waters after Conviction's
plot has run its course, and I've chosen to address them in a
separate piece just as the movie choses to ignore them all together.
And it's only fair because this is really a story about his sister, and
the unbelievable determination with which she stood by her brother.
It's a great story, well-acted, solidly filmed. And hard as it may
be to believe, most of it's true. |
