An American Crime

I watched An American Crime with H last week, and I'm still not exactly sure what to think of it. On the one hand, it's a creepily effective look into one of the worst crimes the state of Indiana has ever seen. On the other hand, the retelling gives us nothing new.

Ellen Page plays Sylvia Likens, a 16 year-old daughter of carnival workers. When her parents leave her and her sister with Gertrude Baniszewski's family while they travel with the carnival, they think she is being left in the hands of a kind, god-fearing woman. What they do not know is that Gertrude, played perfectly by Catherine Keener, is a psychopath who tortures Sylvia for no reason at all. Sylvia is kept locked in the basement, given little food and water, kicked, beaten, burned and branded by Gertrude, her children, and several neighborhood teens that have been invited to help in Sylvia's "punishment."

The strongest point this movie has is the strong performances each member of the cast puts in. I've only seen two of Ellen Page's movies, as you could guess one of those being 2007's Juno, the other being the quietly creepy Hard Candy, but all three performances have been superb. She played in turns a girl a guy dreams about in Juno, and a girl from a guy's nightmares in Hard Candy, she plays the helpless Sylvia very well. From about half-way into the movie until the end, her role does not allow for much more emotional depth than looking innocent and screaming, but Page still manages to make that look real. Catherine Keener also plays Gertrude perfectly. Her role called for someone more cool and collected than the usual psychopath and Keener delivered that. Her portrayal is more of a quiet killer, someone who is genuinely insane and believe that they are right, but still someone who would be a pleasure to meet and talk to. Keener definitely could have played this one up, coming across completely unhinged, but her low-key performance is perfect.

The movie's not-so-strong point is its script. I believe that it achieved what it was going for, but I would have preferred a bit more than that. What the writers intended was to give a stark, strictly-procedural view of the events. Much like Sylvia Likens, we have no idea how this terrible thing is happening or what can be done to stop it. The movie is strictly looking at the crime from the outside. It left me wanting a little more. Specifically; why was Gertrude doing this? What was her motive? How did this effect her and her children? What happened to the neighborhood kids who helped? What were they thinking and why did they do what they did?

An American Crime is certainly a shocking, gripping film, but it is a very cold one, having little emotional depth at all.

-J