Tony Goldwyn (2010)
The title of this sibling love story refers to both meanings of Conviction: the brother gets a prison sentence, his younger sister shows courageous determination. Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell) is found guilty of first degree murder in Ayer, Massachusetts in 1983. Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) spends the best part of two decades trying to clear his name and puts herself through law school in order to become Kenny’s attorney. Conviction is, almost needless to say, based on a true story. (According to the film, Kenny and Betty Anne were among the nine children of their mother, sired by seven different men, and spent periods in care. Kenny had form – a series of minor thefts but no criminal history of violence – before the murder, in 1980, of a woman called Katharina Brow.) Because film-makers working with this kind of material tend to include standard setbacks and breakthroughs, the result is somehow always the same true story – or a false story. Perhaps Kenny Waters was arrested on suspicion of murder during his grandfather’s funeral service but Tony Goldwyn’s staging is so crude – the cops interrupting the priest’s eulogy – that the moment seems incredible. The screenplay by Pamela Gray, although it includes some good lines, is largely a matter of joining up the dots between obligatory scenes: a flashback to the two kids involved in a quasi-housebreaking incident that shows Kenny’s (a) quick temper and (b) absolute devotion to Betty Anne; a sequence in which Betty Anne melts the heart of an initially frosty bureaucrat who can yield vital, lost evidence. The continuing dribble of hopeful music by Paul Cantelon is anticipating the happy ending from the word go. The legends at the end of the film, which explain that Betty Anne Waters is still working for the New York-based ‘Innocent Project’ (which takes on alleged miscarriages of justice), omit to mention that his release from prison wasn’t in reality a happy ending for Kenny Waters. He was killed after falling from a wall, a few months after being freed in 2001.
Although it’s utterly unsurprising, Conviction is easy and entertaining enough to watch. Tony Goldwyn keeps things moving competently even if his and Pamela Gray’s concentration on the required elements of the fighting-for-justice-against-the-odds genre makes for very sketchy background information. (How, for example, did Betty Anne, whose marriage breaks up when she decides to become a student, afford to put herself through law school? The closing legends say that the real Betty Anne also still ‘jointly runs’ the bar where we see her working during the film, although you wouldn’t get from what you see that she has a stake in the place.) In spite of the trial scenes (designed mainly to show how the false testimony of two women did for Kenny), there’s remarkably little detail of the incriminating evidence against him. (The revelation that his blood group and the killer’s are the same – group O! – surely couldn’t count for much.)
In a film like this, the emotional dynamics are really all that count. Betty Anne doesn’t, at any stage of her legal education, assess the evidence – she just knows Kenny is innocent. Nancy Taylor is the policewoman who’s determined to pin the crime on Kenny from an early stage: it’s surprising that her word can carry such weight but no matter: it’s she who’s mainly to blame for the guilty verdict because she’s the villain of the piece. (Taylor turns out to be professionally corrupt in other ways, which proves what a thoroughly rotten bitch she is – although it’s never clear if she’s mistaken or vindictive about Kenny and, if it’s the latter, why.) Betty Anne’s husband Rick, in forbidding her to go to law school, is presented as a heartless chauvinist – even though he might reasonably feel that his wife’s obsession with clearing her brother’s name is already threatening to ruin their family life. Rick then disappears from the scene: there’s a sequence in which Betty Anne’s two young teenage sons talk with her about going to live with their father instead of her but it doesn’t appear to happen and there’s no further turbulence in her relationship with the boys.
When some other law students are talking about DNA testing (in 1999, more than a decade after its introduction and five years after the O J Simpson trial), Betty Anne has never heard of this potential key to proving Kenny’s innocence. A few minutes later, the news that it’s state practice in Massachusetts for forensic evidence and exhibits to be disposed of ten years after a trial comes as a bombshell to her. These things could suggest that Betty Anne isn’t as clued up as she might be but they’re there just in order to engineer melodramatic highlights. Goldwyn and Gray don’t mean to disparage Betty Anne: the film has no interest in presenting her as anything but a heroine. When she gets angry (as she often does), she’s righteously angry. Goldwyn and Hilary Swank (who’s also one of the executive producers) take care not to get us feeling ambivalent about how difficult Betty Anne must have been to live with – how the way that she lived might have caused problems for her sons. With her lantern jaw and toothy grin, Hilary Swank looks more like Matt Damon’s sister than Sam Rockwell’s: in flashback scenes, to before Kenny’s conviction, she has a fluidity I’ve not noticed before but it disappears once Betty Anne has embarked on her mission in life. By the age of thirty, Swank had won two undeserved Oscars for playing roles which were ‘challenging’ in terms of their gender identity – a transsexual man in Boys Don’t Cry, a female boxer in Million Dollar Baby. There was nothing ambiguous, however, about either of these characters in terms of audience engagement with them – both were heroic victims. I think I would like Swank better as Betty Anne Waters if her CV suggested a greater willingness to be dislikeable on screen.
Hilary Swank’s lack of nuance as an actress is thrown into relief by the casting of Minnie Driver as Betty Anne’s best friend Abra (the only other mature student in the law school group). It’s ages since I’ve seen Driver on screen but she’s deftly witty in this role, even though Abra’s relentless loyalty to the cause means that she inevitably starts to fade into the background. The supporting actresses in Conviction are much the best thing in it: as well as Driver, Melissa Leo, with the thankless task of playing the wicked cop, gives Nancy Taylor an intriguing individuality that the script denies her. And Juliette Lewis is spectacular as Roseanna, one of the two lying prosecution witnesses – a woman with whom Kenny had a violent affair after the murder was committed but who alleges he confessed to her. When Betty Anne, Abra and Barry Scheck, the head of the ‘Innocent Project’, need more than the DNA evidence to overturn the conviction, they go to Roseanna, asking her to sign an affidavit which admits she lied in court. Juliette Lewis is startlingly aggressive then briefly collapses into tears before regaining her jagged bitterness remarkably quickly: it’s no surprise when Roseanna proves canny enough to know she risks perjury charges and refuses to sign. (‘I didn’t know she knew so many syllables’, says Abra as the trio departs, empty-handed.) Mandy, the daughter to whom Kenny writes devotedly from prison, is played by Ari Graynor (who has the look of a straight-faced Bette Midler). Clea DuVall is her mother, the other false witness.
As Kenny, Sam Rockwell works hard and this is the best performance I’ve seen from him although you’re always aware of his working hard to be the loose cannon that Kenny, even after years in jail, continues to be. Rockwell is good, nevertheless, at suggesting Kenny’s declining hope as prison wears him down. He’s responsible for the film’s strongest moment. When Kenny doesn’t want to take the DNA test, Betty Anne angrily asks him why, and he replies quietly, ‘It’ll come back positive’, and a shadow passes over Betty Anne and the whole screen. (It disappears immediately when Kenny explains that he means that the authorities will rig the test results.) On the whole, the men are eclipsed by the women in Conviction, even though Betty Anne’s sons are convincingly ordinary-looking and well played by Conor Donovan and Owen Campbell. The same goes for Loren Dean as their father. As Barry Scheck, Peter Gallagher is pleasant but weirdly dark-haired: whether it’s a wig or Grecian 2000 I don’t know but it looks odd over a decade on from when Gallagher played the grey-maned ‘King of Real Estate’ in American Beauty.
14 January 2011
