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by Kotto, published on May 5, 2008 at 6:38 PM Not many films make me feel sick to my stomach and not many make me feel such a profound sadness that I'm helpless to do anything but cry. An American Crime chronicles the startling and horrific events that led to the death of sixteen year old Sylvia Likens. The story we're told comes directly from the court transcripts in the case of Baniszewski vs. The State of Indiana. As the story unfolds we slowly spiral from a normal, small town world populated with youthful innocence to one of absolute and inexplicable horror. The story of the events that led up to Likens' death is short and tragic, with many people to fault, including her own parents and sister. Her parents negligently entrusted her and her little sister's care to a woman they had only met once. This woman, Gertrude Baniszewski, was mother to a brood of children and accepted Sylvia and her sister into her home for the simple fact that she needed the money the Likens were offering. But Baniszewski wan't fit to care for the Likens' daughters and within a few months, Sylvia had become the victim of Gertrude's escalating abuse. Sylvia eventually became a prisoner in Baniszewski's basement for an excruciating 27 days, where she was abused and tortured by Baniszewski, her children and also a number of other neighborhood children. How could this have happened? How could so many people be involved in such a horrible crime? How could her own sister not have gone to the police before it was too late? After Sylvia died as a result of her beatings, Baniszewski's was found guilty of her crimes and sentenced to life in prison. Her children and the others involved were also found guilty and sentenced, each one eventually serving two years in prison. While Baniszewski's crimes are unforgivable, the thing I personally found most disturbing was how her example led to her children's and the other children's acts of cold, cruel, brutality. It's a cliche to hear kids can be cruel, but like most cliches, it exists because its true. We're probably all guilty of having picked on someone as a kid, of having done something cruel we had no rational explanation for. Like a pen full of chickens who peck to death the weakest bird, we can, at times, find ourselves swept away in a current of hate. This hate has no basis, no justification, no purpose, but it somehow manages to find life and for an instant we find ourselves seduced by something that would otherwise repulse us. This is what makes the crimes committed in An American Crime seem so horrific -- that, given the circumstances, any one of us could be led, lured, pressured or brainwashed into committing horrible acts of cruelty. We wonder how genocide can happen in places like Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, Rwanda, Darfur, Armenia and so on, but if we study these instances we see how large groups of otherwise rational people can become complicit in heinous acts. One person, a leader, or a group of leaders, through their words and actions, can ignite the hatred of many with very dire circumstances -- it happens everywhere in the world, it happens more frequently than we would like to admit, and it often happens in the name of "God." So who is to say it can't or won't happen to us? The most effective and disturbing aspect of AAC was the portrayal of this frightening aspect of human nature. While exploitation films like Cannibal Holocaust, Maniac, or Guinea Pig: Flower of Flesh and Blood may succeed in sickening us, they rarely leave us searching for answers to esoteric questions. In these films, we see sensationalized acts of violence and gore as spectacles of violence in the same way pornography makes spectacle of sex. The sensationalistic nature of exploitation films is ultimately what undermines their ability to be profound and in their zeal to shock us they unwittingly allow us to disassociate ourselves from the acts of extremism they portray. The world we are introduced to in AAC is not sensational, on the contrary, it is simple, ordinary, common and comfortable. The production design and cinematography work in harmony, lulling the viewer into believing they are witness to a more innocent time and place and as the story builds the Norman Rockwell veneer slowly begins to chip away until it is displaced by a world of suffocating doom. The resulting effect is that AAC gets under our skin and disturbs us in a profound way since these crimes could have been committed in our neighborhood, by our neighbors and possibly by people we knew and trusted. Most disturbing of all is the realization these crimes could have involved us. It would be easy to demonize Baniszewski and all the others involved in Likens death, but writer/director Tommy O'Haver chooses to humanize them instead. In doing so their horrible acts of abuse and torture linger and beg the recurring question: how could they have done this? When we see the faces of the children in court, we don't see the faces of psychopaths, we see innocent children with no explanation for their actions. Only Baniszewski herself comes across as a detached, delusional and remorseless criminal and Catherine Keener has to be applauded for somehow managing to add complexity and insight to someone guilty of such crimes. Keener's subtle performance aside, the standout in this movie is Ellen Page who breaks our heart when we watch her stripped of her innocence. Before AAC, Page drew raves for her performances in Hard Candy and Juno. In both those films she played a precocious, smart assed hipster who had the world on the tip of her little finger. The subsequent backlash that came from the ridiculously over hyped phenomena of Juno called into question Page's ability to play anything other than what she herself seemed to be: a precocious, smart assed hipster with the world on the tip of her finger. I too doubted her ability to do much else, but after watching ACC, I'm now eating my doubt for lunch. Page plays Likens as a sensitive, kind and considerate sixteen year old and when the world comes crashing down upon her, the suffering she endures is heartbreaking and convincingly rendered by Page. I'm sure few would agree with me, but Page's breakthrough performance wasn't in Juno, it was in An American Crime. RIP Sylvia Likens 1949-1965 Source: eattheblinds.blogspot.com |
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© 2006-2010 Dominik Keppner
© 2006-2010 Dominik Keppner
