Conviction

Posted on February 1, 2011 at 8:00 am

Sam Rockwell gives one of the best performances of the year as Kenny Waters, a man wrongly convicted of murder for eighteen years until his sister was able to prove that he was innocent and get him released. Betty Ann (Hillary Swank) and Kenny were two of nine children from seven fathers raised in a succession of foster homes. She was a high school dropout and new mother when he went to prison. She went back to school, graduated from college and law school, passed the bar, and with the help of Cardozo Law School’s Innocence Project, was able to prove through DNA evidence that the blood found at the crime scene was not his.

Rockwell is mesmerizing as a man whose kind heart and family loyalty sometimes suffer from his impulsively confrontational behavior. He conveys at every stage the weight of his experience in prison as we see him over the 18-year period. His frustration, longing, despair, his fear of hoping too much mingled with his unquenchable pride in his sister are all heartbreakingly evident. He shows us why he was one of the local police department’s favorite “usual suspects” but he also shows us why someone would spend her life working on his behalf, even after everyone tells her to move on.

Director Tony Goldwyn and screenwriter Pamela Gray do a fine job of shaping the material, giving us a sense of the characters’ past experiences, the strength of their connection, and the press of time. The cast includes the reliable support of Minnie Driver as Betty Ann’s law school classmate and loyal friend and Juliette Lewis, outstanding as a recanting witness.

Swank, who co-produced, is sincere and dedicated if not ideal casting for this role. She has gravitated lately to a series of heroic characters, though her best work has been in more damaged or fragile roles. A high school dropout in real life, she is drawn to characters who exemplify education and achievement. But she gives us no sense of school as anything but an obstacle course. Her learning is not tied in any way to expanded understanding; she seems to have no curiosity about the law and no passion for anything but freeing her brother. We see the impact of her single-mindedness on her husband and sons but not how their reactions affect her. The story is one of triumph that cannot help but move us, but as a real-life character who gives everything, Swank does not give us enough.

Howl

Posted on October 14, 2010 at 6:00 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	NR
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language with sexual references, some crude
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	October 15, 2010

In the post-WWII era of peace and prosperity — and the Cold War and the blacklist and conformity — a small group of writers found much to terrify and infuriate them. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” one of them wrote, the beginning of a barbaric yawp of a poem of fury and protest called “Howl.” His name was Allen Ginsberg.
This movie is not the story of Ginsberg (smoothly played by James Franco), who would go on to become one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed and influential poets, though he is affecting, even at times electric. It is the story of the poem itself, taking us back and forth between three key moments. First is Ginsberg’s own performance, reading the poem aloud in a small, smoky club. Second is an interview two years later with a now-bearded Ginsberg in his apartment. And third is a courtroom, where the obscenity charges brought not against Ginsberg but against his publisher, fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were being argued.
“Experts” (Mary-Louise Parker, Alessandro Nivola, Jeff Daniels) debate the literary merit and destructively prurient content of Ginsberg’s work on the witness stand. The prosecution (David Straithairn) argues that the poem is so detrimental to the minds of Americans that it should not even be seen. For the defense, Jake Ehrlich (“Man Men’s” Jon Hamm), with a natty four-cornered pocket square handkerchief, who shows the court that far more important than any expert’s opinion on the value of Howl as a work of art is the freedom for Americans to decide that issue for themselves.
And for me at least, that is where the real poetry is.

(more…)

A Thanksgiving Treat

Posted on November 26, 2009 at 6:00 am

One of my very favorite movies begins with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the original Miracle on 34th Street.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yTNW5a08yw

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Best wishes to you and your families, and please know how grateful I am for the chance to be here on Beliefnet and for every one of your comments.

American Violet

Posted on October 13, 2009 at 8:00 am

Meet two extraordinary women — Dee Roberts, based on a real-life single mother who took on corrupt and racist law enforcement officials in Texas and Nicole Beharie, the woman who plays her, who makes one of the most thrilling feature film debuts in years.

Dee is a single mother who lives in the projects. She works as a waitress and cares for her four daughters with the help of her mother (Alfre Woodard), a hairdresser. Her community is constantly being caught up in violent law enforcement sweeps that result in widespread arrests of people too poor, uninformed, and desperate to go to court. The county and state get federal funds based on conviction rates so they push hard, often without any real evidence. And the people who have been arrested, all black and all poor, have no resources to defend themselves and settle for plea bargains, not realizing that the admission of guilt will cut off their welfare payments and right to vote.

An ACLU lawyer (Tim Blake Nelson) arrives in town willing to challenge the district attorney (Michael O’Keefe), but he needs local counsel and he needs a plaintiff — someone who has been abused by the process to file the lawsuit. Only Dee has the courage and passion for justice to challenge the established power in her city.

Thankfully, the film avoids the too-frequent failure of making the white characters the heroes of a civil rights story. In this case, it is in part due to a skillful screenplay by Bill Haney and to Beharie’s star power in a performance of extraordinary sensitivity and fire. She has a mesmerizing ability to convey the mingled emotions of fear and resolve while maintaining sweetness and dignity. Her interactions with the four real-life sisters who play her young daughters feels completely authentic and as she thinks through her choices we feel we can see her weigh every option. The story is a classic American triumph of the oppressed through the court system but Dee is more than a client and a figurehead; she is an essential strategist, coming up with a crucial change of plans at the case’s turning point, and a constant source of inspiration. “After what they done to me, they made it my business,” she tells her mother.

It hits a little heavily on the implications of the 2000 election but wisely puts the story in context so that it is clear that the problem is systemic and not the result of one official or one town. Even more wisely, it keeps the focus on Dee, who as portrayed by Beharie is truly mesmerizing.

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Based on a true story Courtroom Crime

Changeling

Posted on February 17, 2009 at 5:00 pm

Radiantly beatific, Angelina Jolie glows with mother love in bright red lipstick and a series of divine cloche hats as Christine Collins, a devoted single mother, in this fact-based drama directed by Clint Eastwood. In 1928 Los Angeles, while she was at work, her son Walter just disappeared. Months later, the police told her they had found him, but the boy they gave her was not her son. She was pressured by corrupt cops to accept the new boy as hers. When she persisted in pointing out that not only was this boy physically different from Walter but that his dentist and teacher were on her side, she was committed to a mental institution and told she could not leave until she dropped all efforts to prove that her son had not been returned.

Eastwood’s meticulous direction and the sheer outrageousness of the story make for absorbing drama, though the very strangeness of the underlying facts makes the material seem overpacked (the running time is almost two and a half hours) and its discursive unfolding diminishes the dramatic effect.

It is impossible not to bring Jolie’s public role as a devoted mother of six to her performance here. Once Hollywood’s most notorious wild child, Jolie has transformed her public persona into a sort of earth Mother Courage on behalf of her own multi-cultural brood and on behalf of all the world’s poor and neglected children with her work for the United Nations. All of that blends in to the ferocity she brings to this role, diminishing the power of the story. The stand-out performances here are Ryan as the indomitable inmate and Jason Butler Harner as the man who probably knows what happened to Walter.

An additional distraction is the effort to put three separate stories into one long drama. The first act is the boy’s disappearance and the horrifyingly absurd attempt to persuade Collins that another child is her son. The second is a “Snake Pit”/”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” diversion after she is thrown into the state mental hospital, where she is subjected to abuse but meets another inmate (the always-outstanding Amy Ryan) whose honesty and courage helps sustain her hope. And then there is a third act, where Collins all but disappears as the crime drama plays out and we find out what happened to the boy and what happened to those responsible.

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Based on a true story Courtroom Drama