Conviction (***)

A movie’s appeal really shouldn’t depend on whether the story it tells really happened to someone, but it probably does help here to know that Betty Anne Waters really did decide to go to law school, not even having finished high school, just to get her brother Kenny out of jail. This is the sort of inspirational role that Hilary Swank seems to have made a specialty of, and having heard the real Betty Anne, I can say she nails both the rural Massachusetts accent and the sense of, yes, conviction that keeps Betty Anne moving forward.

Betty Anne and Kenny were part of a large, unstable family led by an undependable mother, and Kenny (Sam Rockwell) was prone to getting in fights, which is one reason attention was focused on him after a 1980 murder. Director Tony Goldwyn and writer Pamela Gray, who previously collaborated on 1999’s A Walk on the Moon, include brief but effective flashback scenes that provide a sense of the closeness that the two siblings developed. Rockwell’s few scenes show the actor’s range. There is suspense in the way Goldwyn shows us the testimony that convicted Kenny, and then shows how the jury was misled.

The underdog story seems so tailor-made for a movie that it seems almost too perfect. There is a murder, but not a mystery. The good and the evil are clear. Other stories of wrongful conviction often reveal a series of well-intentioned mistakes, cops and prosecutors trying their best but making errors and false assumptions. Here there is only the actions of one reckless cop, who is well played by Melissa Leo, but an unambiguous villain. And Betty is an unambiguous heroine. Therefore we have a well-told story, but without elements that would make the film truly great or surprising.

IMDB link

viewed 9/28/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/16/10