Review of An American Crime (2007) by Lindsay M — 21 Nov 2008

Young Sylvia Likens died while living at somebody else's home, the words "I'M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT!" carved into her belly. She'd spent the preceding months being burned, flogged and degraded by various kids from her neighborhood, and her own temporary guardian. "An American Crime" tells Sylvia's (true) story. Here's some things the film doesn't tell us: 1.) Sylvia once stole gym clothes and 2.) She spread rumours that her guardian's two eldest daughters were promiscuous. (Apparently, we movie-watchers are only sufficiently moved when we see an entire family brutalize, sexually humiliate and kill another human being if the victim in question isn't a gym-clothes-stealing rumour-spreader.) Sanitizing and over-simplifying poor Sylvia's tale may have been forgivable, if co-scripters Tommy OâHaver and Irene Turner had used the extra film-time gained from all that detail-shaving to take up the troubling questions that the bizarre circumstances surrounding the crime raise---about mob mentality, corrosive parenting, morality and complicity through silence. But they didn't. Instead, we spend an hour watching Sylvia (Ellen Page) get beat up, and ten minutes being tricked into thinking she's escaped (only to discover we've been watching a fake-out fantasy sequence), and then another five minutes listening to Sylvia narrate the trial for her own murder. Ugh.

By me, The Coast.