Conviction (2010). Great Acting from Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell

Here’s the story. Kenny is accused of first-degree murder. Everyone but his sister abandon him. After three years in jail, Kenny tries to kill himself. He is convicted for life without parole and doesn’t expect his circumstances to change.

I don’t know if it’s now that she decides to continue her studies, but I think it is. She gets her GED in order to be able to go to college and then to Law School. As she gets to Law School, she also finds a new friend, one she needed because she doesn’t have many people in her life to support her and her goals. Minnie Driver as Abra Rice is one of the few, if not the only one, who does, and even she has her doubts about Kenny’s innocence. And yet it’s Abra who makes sure Betty Anne gets out of bed when life gets too heavy, and back to studying.

Nothing very surprising here but then we follow Betty Anne as she tries to find the old evidence for the case in order to use DNA profiling to prove Kenny’s DNA is different from the one lifted at the scene of the crime. Betty Anne and Abra embark on this new mission of finding the old box of evidence. Eventually, after many phone calls and after showing up in person to try to convince various people to look for it yet again, one woman appears holding a box in her arms. And it is the box, despite the fact that according to rules that were in place at the time, it should have been destroyed 10 years after the trial. When the two women, now attorneys, are looking for it, it's 16 years or so after the trial. That was the second piece of luck, the first one being that Massachusetts, where the story takes place, didn’t have the death penalty.

At the end of the film, we learn from a series of captions that after a second trial that lasted, I think, 8 months, Kenny was accorded $3,400,000 (I think) in damages in 2009.

I’ve spoiled this film for you but did it knowing that its strength is not in the storyline, which is rather straightforward and predictable. It’s rather in the acting, the directing. The editing was too visible, too choppy, even though the sequences themselves were timed just right and nicely juxtaposed. It was a character-driven story and somehow the actual action was spliced too much, making the movie feel too fragmented. Still, it was a good movie. Watch it for Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell! Unlike better-edited movies, their acting is memorable.