New on DVD Aug 18 2008 @ 11:00 pm
REVIEW: An American Crime
Directed By: Tommy O'Haver
Written By: Tommy O'Haver & Irene Turner
Starring: Ellen Page, Catherine Keener, James Franco
Running Time: 93 minutes
Rated R for strong and disturbing depiction of child abuse and torture
This review was originally published May 12th, 2008.
The 1966 court case “Baniszewski v. The State of Indiana” detailed what is known as “the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana.” The case prosecuted homemaker and mother of six Gertrude Baniszewski for the prolonged torture, mutilation, and eventual death of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens.
Sylvia Likens was born into an unstable family situation; her parents moved many times a year and had problems holding steady jobs. In 1965, Sylvia’s father Lester arranged for Sylvia and her disabled sister Jenny to stay with Gertrude Baniszewski for a fee of $20 a month even though the home was highly unstable and didn’t even have a working stove. When the monthly payments failed to arrive, Baniszewski started channeling her anger toward the Likens girls. When lies about Baniszewski’s daughter started circulating and were falsely attributed to Sylvia, the abuse and torture of the young girl began in the family basement. Baniszewski’s children quickly rallied behind their mother’s actions and even recruited some of the neighbor children to come over daily to “play with Sylvia.” Their behavior eventually led to Sylvia’s death and the following trial in which Baniszewski would plead “not guilty” to all the charges accumulated against her. An American Crime is an interpretation of these events.
Ellen Page and Catherine Keener
In 2006, Ellen Page starred in Hard Candy playing a teen putting an older man under house arrest and “torturing” him for an afternoon. In this film, the tables are turned as Page plays Likens with an unbridled innocence and proves yet again that she is one of the most valuable young actresses working today. Catherine Keener plays alongside her as Gertrude Baniszewski in a role that would be extremely hard to interpret given the screenplay. Keener does a fantastic job with what she is given and An American Crime is worth sitting through simply to see how her character visibly changes throughout the 93-minute runtime.
Tommy O’Haver’s film is very honest and made with the best of intentions, but his screenplay never decides where its allegiances lie. There are sequences of Sylvia being brutalized by Baniszewski and the children rallied around her that generate an intense hatred for the crazed housewife. Yet, these scenes are interspersed with intensely solemn character moments which, perhaps unintentionally, give the impression that Baniszewski’s actions aren’t as bad as they seem. Her actions certainly aren’t justified by O’Haver’s lens, but developing her into such a sympathetic character downgrades the atrocity taking place in the basement.
Catherine Keener as Gertrude Baniszewski
The scenes of abuse mentioned above are the most unsettling parts of the film and for these moments to actually occur, all involved would have to come under the spell of someone so charismatic and genuinely persuasive that the effect would seem more like brainwashing than personal choice. I sat through many moments in the film feeling more sympathy for Gertrude Baniszewski than young Silvia Likens. Something about it just doesn’t seem right.
An American Crime is a sobering film that made me angry on the inside, but it wasn’t quite sobering enough. Director Tommy O’Haver tries his best to show the torture of Sylvia Likens without delving into exploitative territory. For what he chooses to include in his movie, he does so successfully. Still, many key parts of Sylvia’s case are ignored in lieu of making Gertrude Baniszewski a layered and complex character. It is not wrong to do so; after all, the fact that she was a human being entitles her to some shred of dignity … but not too much. The actions revealed by Sylvia’s dead body and the details of the court case prove Baniszewski to be a psychotic maniac deserving of very little sympathy. Ellen Page and Catherine Keener are powerful in their roles, but An American Crime fails to do what any interpretation of this horrible crime should: wrench the hearts of viewers with an unflinching call to activism.
on May 12 2008 @ 10:56 pm 1. Joe said …
Wow… I didn’t even know about this Ellen Page movie. It looks really dark and disturbing… I might try to check it out at some point!
on May 13 2008 @ 6:38 am 2. Phillip Johnston said …
If you have Showtime, it’s playing there. It traveled around the festival circuit (starting at Sundance in January 2007) and had trouble finding a distributor. It should be on DVD around August, I think.
on May 13 2008 @ 1:25 pm 3. christian said …
Like I mentioned on Chuck’s blog, I can’t stomach this. Even tho I grew up watching FACES OF DEATH. I’m more sensitive to screen abuse now, no matter how artful. So disturbing.
on May 13 2008 @ 2:40 pm 4. Phillip Johnston said …
I used to be totally desensitized to screen violence because I grew up watching movies like Braveheart and The Patriot. Now, I don’t like how those films treat violence so flippantly. In fact, most of Hollywood is flippant about it. I like to think of “resensitized” myself. The scenes of abuse in An American Crime are extremely tasteful, but still very disturbing.
on May 13 2008 @ 3:49 pm 5. Evan Derrick said …
“The scenes of abuse in An American Crime are extremely tasteful, but still very disturbing.”
You need to write an essay on that sentence, Phillip. I find if quite intriguing.
on May 13 2008 @ 4:30 pm 6. Phillip Johnston said …
In short, what makes you flinch isn’t long shots of someone being brutalized but facial expressions coupled with creative camera movements (people punch and kick the camera, etc.). Cinematic trickery that cuts deep.
on May 14 2008 @ 4:42 am 7. Anil Usumezbas said …
I agree with the review. I’ve had the chance to see this in Istanbul Film Festival this year, with the attendance of Tommy O’Haver and I can say it was an impressive work, although it could be much much more. I wrote a short review about the film and O’Haver’s explanations regarding the film here:
http://long-take.blogspot.com/2008/04/27th-international-istanbul-film_20.html
Quoting from here, I can also say that “If the film would realize that its power lies within the idea of inner evils and not lose time with other drama conventions (like the confrontational scene at the end or the escape sequences) it would’ve been remarkable.” For me, “What makes the story (and therefore the movie) so uniquely disturbing and horrifying is not the psychopathic mother (let’s face facts, we have many psychopaths today and many slasher movies to match them), nor the specific details of the torture she implemented but the fact that everybody else went along with it.” The film reminds me of the Milgram Experiment videos that I recently watched on youtube - I sense that they both tell something horrific about the human nature.
Nice review.
on May 14 2008 @ 5:57 am 8. Evan Derrick said …
To add to Anil’s observations, it also recalls the Stanford prison experiments, although in a different light. They set up a mock prison but had to shut it down within days because the ‘wardens’ were becoming nasty and abusive and the ‘prisoners’ were retreating into the psudo-anonymity that they had been shackled with.
On a simpler level, it always amazed me what I was willing to do with a group of my friends as a kid vs. by myself. We vandalized stuff and were generally public nuisances, but on my own I would have been horrified to do any of it. And I was a pretty good kid overall.
Freaky stuff.
on May 14 2008 @ 7:01 am 9. Phillip Johnston said …
Anil, while I was watching the film I thought the things I was assuming were happening inside characters (in their minds, hearts, etc.) were far more interesting than what was going on outside. I was going to bring that up, but figured I wasn’t eloquent enough to expound upon it. Thanks for your comment.
on May 14 2008 @ 7:02 am 10. Chuck said …
I believe Christian is referring to my look at The Girl Next Door, the adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s fictionalization of this case. I’ll have to see this, I still have shaken GIRL, and I’m curious to see if a film with a more professional, polished cast can cast the same spell. Girl was also tasteful in its implication of unimaginable misery.
on May 14 2008 @ 7:03 am 11. Chuck said …
have NOT shaken Girl that is.
on May 14 2008 @ 2:50 pm 12. Anil Usumezbas said …
I’m more than glad to contribute
on May 25 2008 @ 11:39 pm 13. becky said …
I honestly had to turn it off mid way of the movie and calm myself cause i was that upset by it!!! A couple of days later i finally got the nerve up to finish it..
on May 26 2008 @ 9:33 pm 14. Janine said …
This is such a disturbing movie that I want to know more of Sylvia. My heart aches for her.
on May 30 2008 @ 6:59 pm 15. Sahara-Rain Jozanga said …
Though the movie upset me a great deal, it was not the images that hurt my heart the most. It was the fact that this is a real person this happened too. There should be more pride in putting it together, though I thought it was done just fine. But when you take a look at the whole story than you would see that it should all be there and the dream sequence towards the end was very misleading and left out a great bit that would have put more completion to the story.
on May 30 2008 @ 7:31 pm 16. Phillip Johnston said …
Very well put, Sahara. I just worked on a film that the whole team made with the best of intentions to portray a particular idea yet when we reached the cutting room, it came off as the exact opposite of what we wanted. It’s just how art-making works sometime.
Maybe that’s what happened with this film, but we may never know.
on May 30 2008 @ 8:54 pm 17. Evan Derrick said …
Wow, a lot of strong opinions on this one. Regardless of the film’s quality, it certainly seems to have struck some kind of nerve with people.
on Jun 21 2008 @ 3:41 pm 18. Ted Forrester said …
If you liked this movie, Ellen Page also did another disturbing movie called Hard Candy, where she tracks down a pedophile and tortures him for his deisres. It’s similar to this one in the sense that it’s not a truly fantastic movie, but it’s very disturbing and really makes you think about things you may no want to.
on Jun 21 2008 @ 8:30 pm 19. Evan Derrick said …
Thanks for dropping by, Ted. I considered Hard Candy one of my Top 10 of 2006 - it completely blew me away. Brilliant, brilliant film, and it kind of ticked me off when people kept calling Juno Ellen Page’s breakout performance.
on Jul 08 2008 @ 12:19 pm 20. SS said …
I went to the house last week, very scary
on Jul 09 2008 @ 9:01 am 21. joan mariano said …
This was a real story this poor girl was abused in all mental and eventual a physcical way. i was sick to the stomach on the real crime comments.
this pig gertrude is beyond me in the way that all this happened i think she had no care for life and got her kicks, I just wish i was there I would have done something about this from day 1.. Just goes to show how things can happen under your nose and you dont know. totally made me feel sick, these people hope they rot in hell, cos that is where I hope they will be….
Why would any mother do this to anyone, anyway.
sick, sick, sick
had nightmares about it all
cant believe it really happened
on Aug 18 2008 @ 11:41 pm 22. Sam Juliano said …
I saw HARD CANDY, but not this film. I think we can look at your final sentence, superbly worded to absorb the final judgement–if it doesn’t wrench your heart and drive you towards activism, it doesn’t resonate. I am not surprised that Page and Keener were superb.
Exceptional, outstanding review. It is apparently worth a look-see despite the well reasoned objections.
on Sep 11 2008 @ 12:46 pm 23. miffy said …
I am heart broken too, as all of us are that this poor soul was not rescued and lived like no-one should. I just can’t believe that children from school would come and abuse her too, I cannot wrap my head around it. Also, why didn’t the parents call to speak to the children ever? Ellen Page is the most amazing actress. Has anyone seen the movie she is in where she is looking for her lost sister?