Movie review in the Friday, Oct. 22 Oregonian....
"Conviction" is an agreeable little legal docudrama that's doomed to faint praise: It earns head-pat adjectives like "admirable" and "inspiring" and "restrained" and "well-acted" and "solidly crafted," but never quite stirs the deeper passions.
The film recounts the real-life 18-year struggle of Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank) to free her hothead brother Kenneth (Sam Rockwell) after he was wrongly convicted of murder in Massachusetts in 1983. The obstacles are Sisyphean, the achievement superhuman: In the movie, Waters earns everything from a GED to a law degree while straining her family, working as a waitress and waging a painfully slow war against bureaucracy, politics, corrupt cops, unreliable witnesses and the careless storage of evidence.
It's a remarkable real-life story, and director Tony Goldwyn does a decent job skipping through time in the film's first half as he skims the Betty/Kenneth backstory. And with the exception of the underused Rockwell -- who sadly doesn't have much to do here except throw a few fits and sit in prison while his eye-wrinkles deepen -- the performances by actors not named Juliette Lewis are for the most part nicely ... restrained. Swank's Massachusetts accent never feels like an actorly affectation, for example, and it's nice to see Minnie Driver and Peter Gallagher on the big screen again as Betty's legal allies.
But the Pamela Gray script also feels a bit like it's running on TV-movie rails, keeping a nice respectful distance from anything too emotionally thorny, including Kenneth's depression in prison and the familial costs of Betty's obsessive pursuit of justice. I never minded the movie; I just wish I'd felt its beat-the-system drama more profoundly, instead of giving it a polite nod as it ended. It's the sort of earnest drama that might earn a token Oscar nomination and make everyone involved feel good about themselves before quietly fading from cultural memory (precedent: John Travolta's "A Civil Action," 1998).
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(107 min., rated R, playing in Portland at the Fox Tower) Grade: B-minus
'Conviction' (The Oregonian, Friday, Oct. 22, 2010)
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