If Ellen Page ever worried that her roles in Juno and Smart People would too securely set her image as a feisty know-it-all, she chose well to appear in An American Crime, a film that manages to wrench all the placid innocence from her bones, writes Gina Bellafante. The movie, which appeared at the Sundance Film Festival last year and which made its debut on Showtime on Saturday, calls for none of her verbal wood chopping. Indeed, it demands a listless opposite, turning Ms. Page’s body into a cadaver long before her character becomes one, speaking to us softly, phlegmatically and from the grave. Ms. Page is all dreamy, spectral passivity; she mesmerizes. But so much is done to her that it is hard to know what she is actually doing.Children are victimized so frequently on television these days — the babies left in Dumpsters on Law & Order: SVU, the boys or girls raped or chained up on Medium — that we may think we’ve become inured to depictions of such abuse. But An American Crime is such a shocking study of the will to defile, so forensic in its details, that it arrives as an act of vengeance against our habituation.
Based on the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl in Indianapolis in 1965 who found herself subjected to cruelties any adjectives applied here would only cheapen, the film almost begs us to look anywhere else. Her parents, carnival workers, leave her and her younger sister in the temporary care of a local laundress named Gertrude Baniszewski. Sylvia is burned, bruised, beaten and sodomized, the horrors magnified by the viral quality of her steward’s sadism. Before long, it isn’t merely Baniszewski drawing the blood, but her lot of vacant-looking children and a whole neighbourhood of young novices bored into violence.
Tommy O’Haver, the film’s director and co-writer, tips us to its agenda in the economy of his title. Sylvia had the misfortune to be born to parents who were comfortable leaving her with a stranger, but she also had the bad luck to grow up in a time and a place where ignorance was understood as its own brand of wisdom. The 1960s haven’t yet sounded the nation’s social alarm clock. Images of Vietnam flicker on television sets (Mr. O’Haver gives us President Johnson making a speech about General Westmoreland) but no one in an Indianapolis of church picnics and girl-group pop is paying heed.
Sylvia’s community, we learn, did nothing to save her. An older neighbour of Baniszewski’s, in cheap make-up that she seems to think will dignify her, had a faint hint of what was going on, but testifies at Baniszewski’s murder trial that she simply couldn’t judge a hard-working woman who seemed to be struggling. Despite all the visual terror in An American Crime, the single most disturbing moment is aural: Sylvia explaining in post-mortem voice-over, quite matter-of-factly, that her parents kept working, leaving her younger sister behind again, after the trial, this time with a local district attorney.
Mr. O’Haver understands the inexplicable nature of horrors like this one and he never panders to our reductive wish for clear answers. Gertrude Baniszewski, portrayed brilliantly by Catherine Keener, was clearly a woman who struggled: she had respiratory problems, multiple children with different men and virtually no money. But Mr. O’Haver doesn’t redeem her with a more extensive biography, a litany of whatever deeper mistreatments she surely endured. Ms. Keener takes on the role as if she were built on a skeleton of rusty needles. Looking at her, we know plenty. Baniszewski hates the purity of Sylvia, a quality she can neither reclaim for herself nor bequeath to her daughters, whose young lives already seem destined for similar miseries.
An American Crime is the most brutal evocation of wrongdoing to appear in quite a while; it is hardly a pleasure to watch. But it is also one of the best television movies to appear in years.
