Conviction (2010)

Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell) was a volatile guy. Early in Conviction, we see him dancing with abandon with his infant daughter in a bar. But the sweetness quickly turns ugly when he accidentally spills a drink on a fellow patron, who is critical of his child-rearing style. Kenny pounces on the man with such speed and viciousness, wielding a broken beer bottle no less, that you can almost believe that he’s guilty of the bloody crime for which he was convicted and ultimately served 18 years in prison.

It’s almost unsurprising, then, that the local police in the Massachusetts town of Ayers looks to him first when a woman is robbed and brutally stabbed to death in her trailer home. Female cop Nancy Taylor (Melissa Leo) is especially committed to proving Kenny’s guilt. But his sister Betty Anne (Hillary Swank) has convictions of her own and knows that her brother is wrongly accused. The high school drop-out takes it upon herself to get her GED, finish college and law school, and pass the Bar Exam in order to become her brother’s legal champion.

Wouldn’t it have been easier and more cost-efficient to hire Johnny Cochran?

I don’t mean to make light of this remarkable true story. After all, Betty Anne’s real-life sisterly love and devotion resulted in the DNA-backed exoneration of her brother in 2001. Still, something in the way that screenwriter Pamela Gray and director Tony Goldwyn tell their story invites a level of flippancy.

Perhaps it’s the way that Conviction glosses over Kenny’s trial and subsequent appeals in order to focus on Betty Anne’s years of struggle, during which she loses her husband and almost loses her two sons. Maybe it’s the fact that both of those events are also given the “yadda yadda” treatment. It could even be the way that Betty Anne’s decision to go to law school is presented in the film as a five-second look at a bunch of backpacking-wearing college kids from behind the wheel of her sedan. Poignant.

I understand the filmmakers’ desire to resist engaging in the emotional manipulation of a story as fascinating as this one. Still, audiences are trained to expect a little poetic license. Conviction is a dramatic film, not a documentary.

Goldwyn does take the liberty of starting the story from the middle–with Betty Anne meeting another late-life law student named Abra (Minnie Driver), who becomes her best friend and Kenny’s co-gladiator. From there, he flashes back to the arrest, the trial, Kenny’s suicide attempt in prison, and intervening years of jailhouse visits.

He also includes some syrupy-sweet scenes of the Waters children, who spent their young years in and out of foster homes, stealing candy and breaking into people’s homes to pretend they had a normal life. Even these techniques, though, seem like something you could have gotten out of a Lifetime Original Picture, rather than something Hilary Swank would sign on for.

Swank was the first-choice pick for the role of Betty Anne when Goldwyn began working on this project nine years ago (after seeing the Waters family on Dateline). But shortly after her Oscar win for Boys Don’t Cry, she wasn’t in the market for another real-life story. Fast-forward six years and another Oscar later and she was in. The role, of course, fits the girls-with-gumption resume that Swank is building. The trouble is that she plays Betty Anne with significantly less of her trademarked toughness but still isn’t any more vulnerable…even though she cries a lot (I mean a lot) in this film.

Clea Duvall and Juliette Lewis also make notable appearances as Kenny’s ex-wife and ex-girlfriend, respectively. Lewis–and her spot-on New England cadence–grabs hold of her two scenes with perfectly over-the-top white trashiness and runs away with them.

For his part, Rockwell turns in a terrific performance. He doesn’t occupy nearly as much screen time as crying Betty, but when he is present, he’s captivating. Rockwell’s portrayal is filled with a nervous, anxious energy that always threatens to spin out of control but never does. In that early barroom brawl scene, he switches from doting daddy to rowdy roughneck and then to class clown (he ends the scene by jovially mooning the whole bar). It’s the acting equivalent of driving a car at 100 miles per hour and still cornering like he’s on rails. I have to wonder if the fact that Rockwell never actually met Kenny Waters, who passed away in a freak accident six months after his prison release, allowed him to gain a unique insight into the man. Or at the very least, paint his own, more interesting portrait.

Goldwyn has said that for him this movie was a love story, albeit between a pair of siblings. But the real-life story of Kenny and Betty Anne Waters is also a harrowing tale of underdogs taking on the system. Despite the obviously good intentions of the filmmakers and a few standout performances, Conviction isn’t entirely successful in either genre.