Conviction tells the incredible story of Betty Anne Waters’ journey to free her brother who was wrongly convicted for murder. This is the kind of gritty role that you have come to expect of Hilary Swank after her Oscar win for Million Dollar Baby….
Conviction tells the incredible story of Betty Anne Waters’ journey to free her brother who was wrongly convicted for murder. From what you would call the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ Betty Anne (played by Hilary Swank) and Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell) were best friends as well as brother and sister. When a murder is committed in their town Kenny is brought in for questioning and ultimately unjustly convicted of the crime.
After he attempts suicide in prison Betty Anne commits to doing whatever it takes to get him out, a path that would ultimately lead her to finishing high school, completing college, passing the state bar exam and the working as his attorney in an attempt to free him.
Left: Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell as sister and brother Betty-Anne and Kenny Waters.
This is the kind of gritty role that you have come to expect of Swank. It is very similar to her Oscar-winning character in Million Dollar Baby in terms of the character history and dogged determination to change the future but I don’t think that this performance was as polished or that this will be an Oscar-winning movie.
I can’t speak highly enough of the actual storyline but I thought that the portrayal of the two main characters by Swank and Rockwell were a bit overdone. There were not any smooth transitions between emotional displays so it felt a little robotic. Also, with the events happening in Massachusetts the actors felt it necessary to imitate the awful area accent which served as more of a distraction than an addition to good storytelling.
Below: Swank’s character goes to law school to prove her brother’s innocence but the movie glossed over the emotional difficulty of the task at hand.
Minnie Driver gives a good performance as Betty Anne’s sidekick Abra Rice and has some reasonable lines but overall there are too many similarities between all of the performances to lay blame on the actors. Director Tony Goldwyn was responsible for the direction of the Zach Braff film The Last Kiss but apart from that has a background mainly in TV direction and it didn’t feel like he had a firm grasp of the subtleties of movie story telling.
Below: Minnie Driver was an adequate sidekick to Hilary Swanks character but all characters seemed to suffer from inadequate direction.
The story is incredible, it absolutely is, but good stories fall into two categories – ones that make great movies and stories that make great dinner party conversation and I think this falls into the latter category.
It was a full and complete story – including villains and plot twists – however, because the events happened over such a long period of time there was no way that it was all going to fit cohesively into a feature length movie. There were just too many parts that felt glossed over with either not enough back-story to know the relevance of a particular detail or not enough detail in a given event to feel like it was really adding to the story.
The movie really starts when they are both adults, and by my calculations (1 year for a G.E.D, 4 years college, 4 years Law school, 1 year to pass the bar) it takes a decade from start to finish. A decade that must have been full of every single emotion but the tone of the movie just didn’t manage to capture the fullness of it at all. Instead it felt like a movie that had been made from a checklist of parts to mention rather than it being crafted into a full-bodied story.
By Jeremy White, 5 February 2011.
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