Review of An American Crime (2007) by Jessica G — 21 Nov 2008

I thought it was a good attempt to bring this horrifying story to the movies, however, the movie dosen't even come close to how cruelly Sylvia was really treated.

In the movie, she seems mistreated, but in reality, she was tortured to death.

***SPOILER WARNING***.

Based on a real story, the most shocking case of child abuse I have ever read.

An obviously disturbed woman, Gertrude, agrees to take care of two teenage girls for 20$ a week.

But when they don't do as she says, she punishes them.

Sylvia gets accused of things that are not true, like being a thief, a prostitute, pregnant e.t.c.

For all these lies, SHE gets punished.

Then the children of the family start punishing her too, afraid the mother is going to do what she does to Sylvia.

Sylvia gets burned by cigarettes, kicked and punched, thrown down the basement stairs, having to force herself to push a bottle up her v------- and have "I am a prostitute and I'm proud" burned into her stomach by 2 of the household members.

The movie shows these things, but also don't show many of the most awful things that people did in the real story, like forcing poor Sylvia to eat vomit and feces.

The movie also made it seem that nobody bothered to even check on Sylvia and nobody tried to tell, but the sad fact was that many of the children tried to tell, but were not believed.

I was also dissapointed with the ending, Sylvia did try to escape, but was caught and punished by Gertrude. It just seemed insulting to make the hallucination that she escaped, when in fact, Sylvia was trapped and tortured to death, despite trying to escape.

I also didn't think the make-up department were at hard work, you couldn't tell Sylvia was close to dying.

The real Sylvia had burn marks, skin falling off and ultimately died from starvation, brain hemorrhage and shock.

The "imagination ending" was just insulting as, in the dream, Sylvia was fully capable of running through the neighborhood, go on a car-ride, visit her parents AND come back to the house.

And guess who drove the car?

The person who carved that horrific message on her stomach.

I know it was just in her imagination, but it felt SO insulting to the real Sylvia. The real Sylvia was so weak she told her torturers to feed the dog instead of herself, because she just gave up. I don't think she dreamed of a heroic escape, especially not her torturers helping her!

She actually passed away when they were just going to bathe her, she was just so weak.

It really seemed to me that they tried to "Hollywood" the ending and make things not seem as bad as they were.

I could not picture the Sylvia in the movie being tortured to death, it seemed more that she died from a heartattack in the end.

The real Sylvia was punched, kicked, slapped, burned, humiliated, tied up... she was even kicked and pushed down the basement stairs, then forced to go up so that they could kick her down again. And again. They treated her as a punching bag and one of the sons practiced his Judo on her.

3 months of torture and they killed her. Her body just gave up.

I noticed a similarity between this movie an "Death of a cheerleader". Both real killers were religious, yet in the movie, they change the religious person into a "poor me" character, so that the religious person wouldn't look so bad, or in this movie, took away the incident where Gertrude would bath Sylvia in scolding hot water to "rid of her sins".