Review of Conviction (2010) by Shiira — 14 Nov 2010

When unconditional love tampers with your brain, it can make you say the most illogical things. Seated at a bar table, Betty Anne Walters(Hilary Swank) announces to her party in a voice full of conviction, that the man on the dance floor, her brother, who in the next minute will proceed to threaten a man's life with a broken beer bottle, would make a good dad.

Poor Mandy. Aunt Betty is f*cked-up. Good dads don't bring their babies into bars; good moms, too. In Ben Affleck's "Gone Baby Gone", the townie detectives(played by Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) encounter the same sort of ignorance towards child safety when a bar patron interviewee misses the point completely by chastising Helene McCready(Amy Ryan) for bringing her baby girl to the pub.

..at night. What's the deal with Massachusetts? Betty Anne, it would seem, was dead wrong about her brother's future prospects as a responsible parent, since the film itself, in disaccordance with the sister's assessment of her older sibling, uses The Knack's "My Sharona", a sort of new wave update of Maurice Chevalier's "Thank God for Little Girls", over the soundtrack, almost unilaterally, while Kenny goes full Monty in his daughter's presence, which suggests that "Conviction" has an opinion of its own about the convicted felon that deviates from the official narrative.

Catchy as hell, even in the hands of a two-bit bar band, the power-pop classic is also misogynistic and depraved, the very same qualities that embody the "good" father. Bolstered by the loaded song, a case for flawed gallantry can be made on behalf of Officer Taylor(Melissa Leo), since Kenny's railroading, arguably, rescues Mandy from a father who "always get[s] it up for the touch of the younger kind".

"My Sharona" is not some innocuous pop song. It contextualizes matters. When Kenny holds his victim to the ground, with the jagged glass of the bottle just inches away from severing the man's carotid artery, you can hear him protect Mandy's good name with an intensity that's matched only by Betty Anne's devotion for her brother, an all-consuming relationship some would daresay as being Oedipal in nature, as it subsists at the expense of lapsed and lapsing, marital and familial alliances, beyond all reason.

"My Sharona", with its weird incestuous overtones, suggests a bizarre love triangle, defused by Officer Taylor's creative police work, which sends Kenny to prison and Mandy off to child protective services.

Until she suited her needs, Betty Anne doesn't contact Kenny's daughter for a long time, only doing so when her case dictated that the girl be contacted as a means of freeing her brother through Mandy's mother.

She keeps Kenny to herself; her older brother, her protector, whose letters from prison she saves, like a lover, and who needs to be reminded by the guards during her visits that touching is absolutely prohibited.

As children, the two would lie in Katharine Brow's bed and pretend that they were married. It's what tore them apart, after authorities arrived at the house and discovered their trespassing. Certainly, Kenny had motive.

In "Gone Baby Gone", some law-enforcement chicanery engineered by Chief of Police Jack Doyle(Morgan Freeman) and Detective Sergeant Remy Bressant(Ed Harris) gives Helene's little girl a second chance, which is, in essence, what happens to Mandy, who grows up in the same "white trash" milieu as Amanda McCready.

Betty Anne is similar to the Patrick Kenzie(played by Affleck), who stubbornly believes that a child belongs with its biological parent. But seriously, what kind of man was Kenny Waters? Although it's unforgivable what Officer Taylor did to this innocent man, the man portrayed in "Conviction" does seem like, as they say, a piece of work.

The way he treats the female police officer, who is only doing her job, on the day she comes to question him about the Katharine Brow murder, gets ugly real fast, reducing the law enforcement officer into a sex object with derogatory names such as "buttercup" and "Angie Dickinson", names that become doubly hurtful, since Nancy is not a beautiful woman.

He's being ironic. He's being Mel Gibson-like, in which Mad Max called a female police sergeant "*****t*ts" during his deposition following a DUI arrest in 2006. Gibson comes to mind when one of the witnesses(played by Juliette Lewis) refers to Barry Scheck(Peter Gallagher) as "that Jew lawyer from the tee-vee".

It's bad enough that a girlfriend provided false testimony, but the mother of his child, too? Rather than get angry at the mother, Betty Anne should have tried to be objective for once, and reconsidered Kenny, whose own wife was willing to throw him in jail.

What kind of man was Kenny Walters, anyway? The filmmaker has an answer; an answer in song.