'Conviction' Movie Review

Aren’t Movies Based on Real-Life Stories Supposed to be Touching?

New Drama ‘Conviction’ Doesn’t Do Academy Award-Winning Actress Hilary Swank Justice


Written by: Karen Benardello


Sometimes all it takes is one person to stand up for what they believe is right in order for justice to be served. That was certainly the case with working mother Betty Anne Waters, who spent over a decade working to obtain her law degree solely to represent her wrongfully convicted brother Kenny. Director Tony Goldwyn and two-time Academy Award-winning actress Hilary Swank teamed up in the new drama ‘Conviction’ to prove not only that justice delayed isn’t justice denied, but that women can also accomplish anything they put their minds too.

The movie, which is based on the Waters’ real life story, starts off to a slow start however, as it shows several seemly unrelated events from their childhood and early adult life. While Goldwyn and screenwriter Pamela Gray most likely did this to show the close bond between Betty Anne and Kenny (played by Sam Rockwell), and the fact that they caused mischief as children, there were no cohesive storyline for the first 15-20 minutes of the film. The audience is unable to bond with the characters, and is left wondering how these unconnected events relate to the central storyline.

‘Conviction’ finally got to the point when it showed the adult Betty Anne working part-time as a waitress while she takes classes to earn her degree from Roger Williams University. While she struggles to raise her two teenage sons, Richard (portrayed by Conor Donovan) and Ben (played by Owen Campbell), on her own at the same time, Betty Anne is determined to prove Kenny was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1983. Kenny was arrested for the 1980 slaying of Katharina Brow, but Betty Anne fights to get biological evidence to send to the Innocence Project, an organization that works to overturn unjust convictions.

Expectations for Swank’s performance were high, as she won her first Oscar for her portrayal of transgender man Brandon Teena in the hit 1999 movie ‘Boys Don’t Cry.’ In that role, Swank proved that she knows how to connect to, and accurately depict the emotions of, real-life people. However, in ‘Conviction,’ Swank fails to recapture her former glory; not only does she have the same body language and monotone voice in almost every scene, and doesn’t resonate any of the joys or fears Betty Anne feels. This lack of emotion may in part have been due to the fact that over 18 years’ worth of events was packed into a one-hour and 45-minute film, and a lot of information from Betty Anne’s life was omitted from the final script.

The true stand-out star of ‘Convicted’ is Academy Award-nominated actress Melissa Leo (who first rose to fame in the mid-1990s on ‘Homicide: Life on the Streets’). In the film, she plays Nancy Taylor, the only woman police officer in the Ayer police force in the early 1980s. In order to excel at her job, she pins Katharina’s murder on Kenny. Leo convincingly plays someone who doesn’t care who she has to hurt or what she has to do in order to get what she wants. Viewers will certainly enjoy watching Betty Anne try to take down Nancy and see justice prevail.

Overall, Goldwyn and Gray deserve credit for wanting to showcase Betty Anne’s hard work to free people wrongfully convicted of crime and to fight for inmates’ rights. While obviously the numerous struggles she faced during her two-decade crusade to free her brother couldn’t all be featured in the film, many viewers will still feel cheated from ‘Conviction’s simplistic plot.