An American Crime (2007/First Look Studios DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C- Film: C-
After a
few raves and awards, I expected Tomm O’Haver’s An American Crime (2007) to be a compelling drama about child abuse
and a serious criminal act many may not have heard about before to make for a
mature, intelligent drama, but what seems to have been intended as a theatrical
release was dumped on cable and even worse, is a disaster.
The
overrated Ellen Page plays one of two young sisters being kept by another woman
(Catherine Keener) for extended stays as their parents pay the woman money to
take care of them for a brief period of time, but Gertrude Baniszewski (Keener)
is a controlling, sick, demanding, miserable woman with tendencies towards delusion
and thinks nothing of terrorizing her birth children or any for of child
abuse. She slowly becomes more and more
jealous of one of the sisters (Page) who becomes her main target. After many weeks of intimidation, which turn
to battery, torture and sexual abuse, she is dead.
Told in
too-safe flashbacks, the O’Haver/Irene Turner script takes far too long to get
to the ugly parts, plays it safe for too long, is too lite in its portrayal of
the abuse, than tries to back away with a overly simple and even smug,
condescending resolution that trivializes the abuse and adds up to 92 minutes
of a disaster that is just awful. They
do not have the guts to tell the story bluntly and this backfires by the abuse
inadvertently becoming a celebrated ugliness, maybe a joke and definitely
trivial. It should be at the center of
this, but they try to dump it on the two leads, bad editing and its production
design. The title is also a problem, as
if this kind of abuse only happens in the U.S., but that’s another issue, yet
demonstrates the sloppy approach this train wreck takes. Skip it!
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is soft, has motion blur and look like
an HD shoot, but you can imagine this is shot TV safe or it could not have been
sold to TV, while the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix has little soundfield, is like an
afterthought and has music and sound editing that is too impressed with
itself. Extras include previews for this
and four other First Look releases.
- Nicholas Sheffo
