Sam Rockwell’s character isn’t the best role model; his sister’s character isn’t the most-developed.
By Felicia Feaster
In this film based on a true story, brother and sister Kenny (Sam Rockwell) and Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) have the kind of fierce devotion to each other more often seen in movie lovers or mafiosi. Their connection is undoubtedly forged in a difficult childhood: a negligent mother and a painful separation, courtesy of the foster care system.
A born troublemaker, Kenny has been breaking into neighbors’ homes since childhood, but nothing he does can diminish his sister’s love. Played by the tremendously likable Rockwell (the true revelation here, though co-star Swank will probably get the glory), who has built a career impersonating goofballs and wisenheimers, Kenny is both obnoxious and lovable. He’s one of life’s eternal misfits, doomed to repeat the same mistakes again and again, and skilled at setting lawboys’ teeth on edge.
When grown-up Kenny is arrested for murder and sent away for life, the strange-but-true crux of Kenny and Betty Anne’s story kicks in. Single mom Betty Anne decides to single-handedly get her brother out of prison. She enrolls in law school and works over the course of 18 years to have him exonerated through newfangled DNA evidence. Betty Anne’s sidekick in this lonely crusade is fellow law student Abra Rice (Minnie Driver), a mouthy type who distracts us temporarily from Betty Anne, who—as presented in Conviction—is a bit of a yawn. We’ve seen shades of this character before: the impassioned woman with a cause in Silkwood or Erin Brockovitch. But, while those films gave us some semblance of real, interesting women, Conviction imagines Betty Anne as a virtual saint doing battle for her brother. She comes across as scarily obsessive, with no inner life to illuminate her compulsion. This is probably more director Tony Goldwyn and writer Pamela Gray’s fault than Swank’s: She has no apparent foothold for burrowing into this material in any emotional or psychological way.
Goldwyn’s grandfather was movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, but that provenance has not endowed Tony with the same inborn cinematic flair. Goldwyn gets off to a bad start with an opening that moves back and forth in time in a random, distracting way. The narrative goes from the crime with which Kenny is pinned to the Waters children running wild in Ayers, Mass., then back again several times before it fixes on the present. The film’s later plodding courtroom rigmarole does little to help the situation.
Goldwyn has spent the bulk of his career in television and, frankly, it shows: There is a flat, matter-of-fact artlessness to his mise-en-scne and to his characters, who seem to have had their precious bodily fluids drained, all in the service of telling this astounding story.
