Conviction
By Jon D'Avolio
SPOILER ALERT!! Read with caution!
You know that feeling of frustration you get when you’re furiously changing channels, and you inevitably just get so tired that you end up leaving your TV tuned to the Lifetime Movie Network? More than likely there will be a movie on with a woman who’s been backed into an especially dark corner of her poorly lit basement by a man wielding a shiny butchers knife. It is obviously thunder storming outside, and the only time she can see her attacker is when lightning flashes, evenly spaced of course, every five seconds. We’ve all seen this movie before, had no interest in seeing it in the first place, and knew how it was going to end before it even started.
That’s the feeling I got from Conviction, starring Hilary Swank as a feisty bar-maid turned lawyer, and Sam Rockwell as Swank’s delinquent brother. Although this particular film doesn't involve anyone trying to gut Swank in her creepy basement with any cutlery, it's definitely on the same level of apathy, at least in my mind.
The film portrays a true story based on Swank's character, a 30 something mom who partially owns a bar in rural Massachusetts, her overprotective alpha male brother played by Rockwell, and an alleged crime that Rockwell had committed before the film even started. We know nothing about this crime at all, except that Rockwell had supposedly killed someone, had been tried for it before and is now being tried again, and that everyone is absolutely 100% sure that he is innocent. Swank doesn't have any faith in the criminal defense abilities of the public defense option, and they cant afford an attorney, so Swank makes the only financially viable option in this scenario; She decides to attempt to pass the BAR, go to law school, and act as her brother's own attorney. I personally think just hiring a lawyer would've been considerably cheaper, and much less time consuming.
The movie is filled with senseless flashbacks to times in the past to establish Rockwell's reputation as a likable convict bad boy, with no clear cut indication that a flashback is actually taking place, and we're never really quite sure why the director is bringing us back to this particular time. Excluding the irrelevant flashbacks, the film is also dotted with the occasional random and very poorly explained event, including a scene where Swank announces to her husband that she would like to go law school to defend her brother, at which time her husband freaks out like a male breadwinner in the 1950's would have reacted if his wife had just told him that she wanted to get a job outside of cooking, cleaning and taking care of their 2.5 children. In the next scene, they are divorced, with the only mention of their divorce coming from Swank's unhappy tone when talking to her children about "their father."
With her newly lost spouse and newly found independence, Swank takes it upon herself, possibly with a boatload of inheritance money from a rich dead uncle that she had been saving for a rainy day, to go to law school in her 5 days off per week from her job at the bar in order to exonerate her brother from this crime she's still 100% sure he didn't commit.
At one point in the film, someone breaks the news to Swank that DNA testing is now being used to solve crimes, as opposed to the old, not-very-scientific methods of crime solving used back in the 80's that were used to bring about Rockwell's conviction. She becomes very excited and attempts to locate the original box of evidence from Rockwell's first trial for the same crime, and use this new fangled method of actually solving crimes to bust her brother out of the gray bar hotel.
Much as I expected, as Swank faces hurdle #1 to build drama in this lifeless, slow and sleep inducing mystery, something has gone wrong; The court house's policy in her hick Massachusetts town says that they destroy all evidence from past cases more than 10 years old. Swank has a breakdown, but inevitably becomes more motivated than she was before to exonerate her brother, despite the fact that the evidence she is seeking to locate is 16 years older than the court houses 10 year expiration date, making it a total of 26 years too old.
Spoiler alert: After calling the court house multiple times and having them tell her that they destroyed the evidence over 16 years ago, it turns out that they've actually been storing Rockwell's box of evidence, complete with blood splatters and photographs in a separate store room that no one thought to look in. She ends up obtaining this box of evidence with blood inside of it that will supposedly exonerate Rockwell immediately, and all it took was a little human compassion from the bitchy elderly court clerk who had checked for her multiple times already, and a begrudging Hispanic janitor to locate it. Hilary Swank wins. Again.
You can figure out the rest of the movie from there.
I was actually hoping the court house had destroyed the evidence; at least that way I would have been thrown for a loop, Swank would've actually had to use some of the things she learned in law school, and the audience wouldn't have been able to foresee every single detail of the movie coming 20 minutes in advance.
There would be no storyline or tension in dramas without setbacks, but throughout this film, it seemed that Swank was overcoming the same setbacks again, and again, and again. Legal loopholes not working out in her favor, lost evidence, corrupt police. Over and over and over. All overcome by simply trying the same method of solving it again and again, with no change whatsoever.
All in all, Conviction was just as predictable as it was irrational. Personally I think that Swank's time in law school would've been much better spent attempting to become an anger management therapist. At least then she would've been able to control her urges to throw her own furniture against walls in her home when she faces a setback, and help her brother with a hyperactive thyroid to not physically assault the police officers in the multitude of unnecessary flashbacks used to convey the type of person Rockwell is, that eventually landed him in the slammer.
Had it not been for the fact that this film was based on a true story, I would've been more surprised that anyone would've cared enough to make this movie, let alone have been able to receive funding to produce it. One of the only things that I did find redeeming about it was how happy Rockwell was when he was finally released from prison after a quarter century.
In the end, the plot went nowhere quickly, the movie dragged on for about 30 minutes too long, had too many dramatic scenes with total silence in the background, and everyone knew the ending just 20 minutes into the movie.