Movie Review: Conviction

So ... I made a goal to write daily and now it's 5 minutes to midnight here (when I started writing; now it’s 1 am). Let me, just real quick, tell you about a movie I watched the other night starring Hillary Swank, Sam Rockwell and Minnie Driver. The movie is "Conviction," a powerful true story of Triumphing over enormous odds and a corrupt system that makes me shiver a little just thinking about it. Better yet, since it's late, I think I'm just going to cut and paste a segment from Wikipedia and a link to a really good trailer. I’ll wrap up with a few of my own personal thoughts:

"Conviction is based on the true story of Betty Anne Waters, a single mother who works tirelessly to free her wrongfully convicted brother Kenny. The story unfolds in flashbacks, and the film opens with the scene of a brutal murder in Massachusetts in 1980. We soon see that Betty Anne's life in many ways revolves around her brother, who is now in jail for the murder. Despite Kenny's knack for getting in trouble, they have always been close. Two years after his release as a suspect in the 1980 murder of Katharina Brow in Ayer, Massachusets, "new" testimony from two witnesses lead police to arrest Kenny and he is tried. Based on this circumstantial evidence, Kenny is convicted in 1983 of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. The three main witnesses against him are Sergeant Nancy Taylor (Melissa Leo) from the local police department, his ex-wife, Brend (Clea DuVall), and his ex-girlfriend, Roseanna (Juliette Lewis).  

Three years later, Betty Anne lives with her husband, Rick (Loren Dean) and two sons, Richard and Ben. She is frantic that she has not heard from Kenny, who calls her every week, and she is finally told that he tried to commit suicide in prison. Betty Anne decides to go back to school and become a lawyer so she can free him, but her husband is skeptical and unsupportive, and eventually they split up. As Betty Anne struggles with being a working mother going to law school at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, we see flashbacks of her life growing up with Kenny. Their mother was callous and uncaring, allowing her eight children (by seven different fathers) to grow up almost feral. Kenny and Betty Anne were very close, and used to break into neighborhood homes together just to feel like part of a normal family, until they were sent to separate foster homes. She continues to visit him, working in a bar while going to school, until her sons decide to move in with their Dad. Struggling in school, demoralized and exhausted, she stops going to classes, until a friend from school, played by Minnie Driver, comes to her house and prods her to just get up, get dressed, and get back to class.

In her study group, Betty Anne learns about the new field of DNA testing and realizes this could be the key to overturning Kenny's conviction. She contacts attorney Barry Scheck from the Innocence Project. The backlog of cases will mean waiting more than a year unless she can pass the bar and find the blood evidence from Kenny's trial herself to have it tested. At first she is stonewalled, then told the evidence was destroyed, but she refuses to give up, and she and her friend Abra (Minnie Driver) embark an an odyssey to recover any evidence that might still be stored away somewhere. At the time of the trial, Kenny's blood type was shown to be identical to the killer's but DNA testing didn't exist. In the process, Betty Anne learns from an acquaintance who is now a police officer that Nancy Taylor was fired from the police department for fabricating evidence in another case. This deepens Betty Anne's suspicions about Kenny's conviction and the "evidence" given at trial."

Finally the DNA results come back and "the survey says...."

I hate spoilers so I won't tell you how the movie turns out. You'll have to see it yourself if you want to. I will say ... there are some interesting twists as they navigate several challenging hurdles along the way. It's Rated R for a bloody murder scene at the beginning and for language (Sam Rockwell and his buddies, especially his co-inmates, make for an intriguing bunch....). If you can get past the f-bombs (I didn't appreciate them but they were true to form), the story is strong—one of the best I've seen about not caving to life's trials. The language is a little jarring, but the story is worth it. The characters are raw and the actors spot on. 


Watch the trailer:  http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi4273341977/