Conviction was directed by Tony Goldwyn, who has an interesting list of credits both as an actor and as a TV director – so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, then, when his film turned out to play like a superior TV movie with some excellent character parts. It stars Hilary Swank as Betty Ann Waters, a working-class Massachusetts woman whose brother Kenny (played by a not-at-all-similar Sam Rockwell) was fitted up in the early 80s for the brutal murder of a local woman. As she did in real life, Betty Ann sacrifices everything in the movie to get Kenny out of jail, taking law lessons, passing the bar, losing her husband and family, before securing the services of a high-flying lawyer (Peter Gallagher) who alerts her to the benefits of DNA testing. For the most part, this results in an uplifting Erin Brockovich-style you-go-girl drama, which is good and effortless in a Sunday evening movie kind of way. Disappointingly, though, the film fails to follow up some of its more intriguing avenues, such as the motives of the cop – a stern Melissa Leo – who had it in for Kenny and the identity of the true culprit, which is never an issue. However, Conviction does boast the best ever performance by Juliette Lewis as a crack-toothed drunk whose testimony sent Kenny down. As ordinary as it is otherwise, Conviction crackles with energy when she's on screen, and her monologues – based on actual transcripts – are quite insanely enjoyable.
A quick note here for Tabloid (above), an absolutely fantastic documentary by Errol Morris that has sadly finished its LFF run. I didn't much like Morris's last film, Standard Operating Procedure, which tackled the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, but this one couldn't have been more different. Where SOP was sombre and a little apologetic for its subjects, Tabloid is raucous, fast moving and very, very funny. It tells the story of Joyce McKinney, a North Carolina beauty queen who, in the late 70s, achieved fleeting notoriety by coming to London and kidnapping a former lover whom she claimed had fallen into the clutches of the Mormon Church. This, since her victim refused to appear in the movie and disappeared from the public eye after the court case, we'll have to take Joyce's word for, and the same goes for the rest of her stories, which she tells with great candour and personality. Magnificently, Morris indulges his subject in all her fantasies, before slyly introducing the key players – one from the Daily Express, the other from the Daily Mirror – who covered the story in British tabloids. The 'official' story – basically McKinney's undiluted delusion – was sold to the Express, while the Mirror, excavating her bizarre past, uncovered a murky world of escort services and grubby men's magazines (which McKinney still refuses to cop to, insisting that the images are all doctored). This seemed to do it for McKinney, who slipped out of the limelight in the early 80s. However, as the film reveals, more headlines beckoned just a couple of years ago when a woman fitting McKinney's description – because it was her – became the proud owner of the world's first commercially cloned dogs.
As wonderful as it is, Tabloid doesn't have a UK distributor just yet but a deal can't be far away; indeed, it would even serve a wonderful Hollywood remake (can you remake a doc?) in the style of Jonathan Demme's Wild At Heart. I'm thinking Naomi Watts, with Matt Damon for the Mormon; John Waters to direct, from a script by Tony Grisoni. Any takers?
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