I have yet to see a trailer for Conviction, but can only imagine that its serious-yet-hopeful voiceover contains the phrase ‘One woman’s courage’. This is definitely a ‘one woman’s courage’ type of movie, jam packed with all the against-the-odds heroism and Hilary Swank needed to draw the attention of Oscar voters two months ahead of submitting their nominations for the year. Swank is a fine actress, sometimes terrific, but pursues awards like a personal claims lawyer after an ambulance. In fact one day, perhaps someone will make a film about Hilary Swank’s one woman’s courage in striving for Academy votes like no-one ever before. “She was a transsexual, a crippled athlete, Amelia Earhart and a plucky single mother redneck lawyer… then a combination of all of the above, plus fat and gay and ethnic and maybe on a heart-warming journey of some kind, that’s also an unlikely true story… all for the love of one little golden man.” Okay, that last one hasn’t been made yet, but it can surely only be a matter of time unless some sort of awards intervention is mounted around the Swank household.
If I’ve been too subtle up until this point, Convictionis…
I have yet to see a trailer for Conviction, but can only imagine that its serious-yet-hopeful voiceover contains the phrase 'One woman's courage'. This is definitely a 'one woman's courage' type of movie, jam packed with all the against-the-odds heroism and Hilary Swank needed to draw the attention of Oscar voters two months ahead of submitting their nominations for the year. Swank is a fine actress, sometimes terrific, but pursues awards like a personal claims lawyer after an ambulance. In fact one day, perhaps someone will make a film about Hilary Swank's one woman's courage in striving for Academy votes like no-one ever before. "She was a transsexual, a crippled athlete, Amelia Earhart and a plucky single mother redneck lawyer… then a combination of all of the above, plus fat and gay and ethnic and maybe on a heart-warming journey of some kind, that's also an unlikely true story… all for the love of one little golden man." Okay, that last one hasn't been made yet, but it can surely only be a matter of time unless some sort of awards intervention is mounted around the Swank household.
If I've been too subtle up until this point, Conviction is Oscar bait of the most obvious variety.{{page_break}}
It's not that it's a particularly terrible picture, just one so blatant in its intentions that its story beats are calculated to the point that any savvy filmgoer will be able to predict the narrative path from beginning to end by little more than past experience with this type of film – or actress. Fans will of course point out that it's a true story, that single-mother Betty Ann Waters really did rise from nothing to become a lawyer and free her brother from wrongful conviction after an eighteen-year battle to prove his innocence. But that doesn't mean the story had to be adapted for the screen in such a clichéd and insubstantial way. Neither writer Pamela Gray nor director Tony Gilroy seem to have any grasp of exactly what they're trying to say, only that it's Very Uplifting And Important.
The film swaps at a whim between procedural and family drama without examining either side of Waters' story any deeper than surface level or making any effort to connect the two in meaningful ways. We see Waters' family move away as her focus on freeing her brother becomes ever more single-minded, yet apart from quickly showing her weeping on the pavement after waving her children goodbye and having to be cajoled back to law school the next day by her best friend, there's never any sense that this monumental event had any long-term effect on her as a person or in how she pursued her goal. The hoary old formula – setback, reaction, resolution, rinse, repeat – is never strayed from for a second. As was one of the biggest problems with David Fincher's Benjamin Button a few years ago, we watch characters live through astonishing events which never seem to leave any lasting impact and consequently are robbed of their power. Every time Waters beats the odds to make progress in her apparently hopeless cause, there's no sense of satisfaction because the obstacles in her way have been laid out with such demeaning contrivance.
Attempts to break up the cycle and hook audiences' empathy with regular flashbacks to Betty Ann's childhood are equally miscalculated. The idea is to show how she and her brother forged an unbreakable bond in the face of a difficult upbringing, which simultaneously hinting that their early disregard for authority will be at the root of what turns brother Kenneth into the unruly (but good-hearted, naturally) law-breaker that leads to his imprisonment. These intentions are well and good, but director Goldwyn again fails to sell the hardness of these characters' young lives. We see one scene of Betty's mother taking an overly-aggressive attitude towards her children's misdemeanours and another where the siblings are divided by social services, but everything else takes place in pastel-coloured rural idylls and features 'crimes' so playfully menial that I find it hard to believe most people reading this won't have done something even a little worse in their carefree years than stealing sweets or sneaking into someone else's house to eat them. Were these really the most ominous portents in the Waters children's lives? At times I was wishing I'd lived that childhood.
What keeps the film watchable in spite of itself is the casting. Swank is easy to make fun of for her ravenous Oscarlust, but she's good at selling herself as the likeable underdog without making too big a deal of her emotional cues. Because her character isn't given much in terms of arcing development, her performance can feel as though it's operating on a scene-by-scene basis, but she's engaging and amiable enough that seeing her story through to the end doesn't feel like a chore even if it's fairly obvious how the whole thing is going to play out. It helps her to have best friend Abra along for the ride, played with enormous charisma by Minnie Driver. It's never fully explained what propelled the two to form such a strong friendship, other than them both being the eldest students on their law school course, but Abra provides just enough support and wry comic relief to lighten the mood of an otherwise over-earnest film.
Only Sam Rockwell's Kenneth stops her from stealing the show and what a performance he gives to do so. Rockwell has by now long since staked his claim as one of the great, possibly the greatest, character actors working today and watching him gradually break Kenny down from a short-tempered and rough but ultimately loving family man to forlorn and suicidal convict whose only remaining faith in life comes through his sister's love is tragic and gives the drama the weight its writing fails to earn. As well as finding place for his signature dance moves (ending with a flourish that will please his female fanbase), Rockwell is wise enough to know that he is now recognisable to audiences and approaches the role with his usual fractured charisma, but tweaks it slowly and precisely enough that what we know of the actor melds into how we see the character. Where a lesser actor would try to disguise his real-world persona, Rockwell acknowledges and uses it as a natural transition for allowing his audience to empathise with the character before letting it overtake him. It's a masterpiece of subtlety in a film so otherwise lacking it. If we're going to be talking Conviction come the Oscar nominations in January, fingers crossed that the against-the-odds story belongs to Rockwell.
Overall Score: 5.80 – Bad (5s are movies that either failed at reaching the goals it set out to do, or didn’t set out to do anything special and still had many flaws. Some will enjoy 5s, but unless you’re a fan of this genre, you shouldn’t see it, and might not even want to rent it.)
