CONVICTION

“CONVICTION” (Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell & Minnie Driver)

This is a good film that was hard to like. There’s only one likeable character (Minnie Driver’s Abra Rice) and she’s not a major player. This story centers on a love affair between Kenny Waters and his sister Betty Anne. I’m sorry, there’s no better way to describe it than that – it’s the reason I found the movie hard to like – it make my skin crawl and left a distasteful flavor of incest in my Puritan throat. (Do I hear snickering?)

Well acted, because I hated Kenny and found his sister to be excessively creepy, and well told – they didn’t hold back any punches in making Kenny look like the disgusting alcoholic criminal he was – and yet I walked out of the theatre not caring for it all that much.

Basic plot; Kenny Waters (Sam Rockwell) is arrested for murdering an elderly woman due to his history of arrests for violent behavior & two witnesses that come forth & say that Kenny told them he killed her. When Kenny is found guilty & sentenced to life in prison, his devoted-beyond-reason sister, Betty Anne (Hilary Swank) a high school drop out, decides to go to law school, become a lawyer & get his conviction over-turned.
For me, there was that gnawing feeling that Kenny actually killed the woman & even if he didn’t, the world was a safer place with a hot tempered a**hole like Kenny behind bars.
In the opening scenes Kenny brings his infant daughter into a stink-hole bar, gets drunk and belligerent, fights with a guy that HE bumps into and then gets up on stage and strips totally nude with his baby daughter & adoring sister looking on. Kenny is scum.
When he makes the statement “Cops are drawn to me like bees to honey.” I laughed out loud. Kenny has no remorse – He isn’t the reason he keeps getting arrested for violent acts perpetrated upon innocent people that happen to get in his way – the COPS are just ‘out to get him’. I was glad to see this scum put away & I didn’t care if he was guilty or not.
Although Betty Anne is basically a nice person, she does come across as being simple trailer trash in many scenes. Her unhealthy attachment to Kenny notwithstanding, Betty Anne eventually neglects her own family (2 sons and a husband) to fight for her douche bag of a brother. When she applies for law school she uses ‘Waters’ for a last name instead of her married name – I could only surmise that she did this because she ‘wishes’ she were married to Kenny.
At law school, fellow ‘elderly’ student Abra (Driver) befriends her – In fact Abra goes above & beyond the call of duty in helping Betty Anne get through school and with gathering information on Kenny’s case. When Abra merely ‘suggests’ that she not get her hopes too high because the evidence might prove Kenny's guilt, Betty Anne orders her to leave. It made me wonder what she would have done to me, because I wouldn’t have ‘suggested’ anything, I’d have told her to give it up because he WAS guilty & prison is where he belonged!
At one point Betty Anne makes the statement that Kenny had been in prison for 6 years and ‘MY family really wants him home’. No, they didn’t. Her family abandoned her because of her obsession.
When Betty Anne tries to enlist the help of Kenny’s daughter, Mandy (the baby he took to the bar) I wanted to hogtie her & throw her in the mud. This young girl was obviously better off without an alcoholic violent father in her life – leave her alone!
So I didn’t like the Waters; I could care less if Betty Anne could find a loophole that would gain Kenny’s release – I wanted that jerk to stay in prison. Which, I guess means, congratulations to Swank & Rockwell for ‘becoming’ their characters, but I can’t recommend this film because I just didn’t find much to like about the ‘subject’ matter.