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Here is a film that started off as something deeply disturbing, a comment on mob-mentality and how when allowed the opportunity to let our darkest impulses run wild we shall we do so with alarming glee, and ends up leaving a distasteful feeling within us for a different reason entirely. Inspired by the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl who was brutally tortured and starved to death by her caretaker, Gertrude Baniszewski, An American Crime is well acted by its two leads, but there’s not much else to discuss.
Ellen Page stars as Likens, and from the moment we see her, she has already given way to a doomed martyr. The film never gives Page much of a character to play before the abuse starts and she’s only allowed to convulse in agony and cry. But Page tries mightily to carve out a real teenage girl before everything falls apart. Catherine Keener plays Baniszewski, a fraught, sickly mother with a tenuous grip on reality from the beginning. Small details like her children cowering in fear over certain words, or allowing them to decide on punishments for others, tips off that all is not right within this woman’s mind. Keener does great work here, alternately engaging our sympathy for how destitute her life and making us recall in horror as she forces Page to stick a Coke bottle in private places.
But An American Crime flies off the rails in the third act. It presents us with a false happy ending, an ugly decision. It gives a false note of uplift, as is the deceptive choice to have her provide a voice over narration. It’s a grab at blatant manipulation, a trick to distract us from the inevitability that she will die. That imagined rescue scene though sticks out the hardest and is a pain the side. It sinks a movie that was floating on the surface of good, but not great, and tanks it right into the territory of bad. To climax a film based on a true story with such a dishonest choice waivers in-between bad taste and purely obscene exploitation.
