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AN AMERICAN CRIME is a problematic small reenactment of a proper criminal case of child abuse dating befriend to 1965. The record is horrifying and while the film places the facts in our faces, the impact of the film is out of focus. This is due to the script that elects to glaze over the motivational aspects of a brutal crime in favor of attempting to investigate fully the mindset of both the perpetrator and the victims. Were it not for some well-behaved performances by Catherine Keener and Ellen Page this film might be easily dismissed: the strength of these actresses to overcome a feeble script and manage to involve us is distinguished to their credit as artists.

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Indiana, 1965, and Gertrude Baniszewski (Catherine Keener) is a ‘borderline’ single mother of several children who is asked to hold care of Sylvia (Ellen Page) and Jennie Likens (Hayley McFarland) while the girls parents remain on the road as carnies, promising to send checks to relieve serve their farmed out children. Gertrude is a woman of loose morals who adds babies to her sizable family during liaisons with young men like the itinerant Dennis (James Franco) . Gertrude takes in laundry to assist her household and requires her young children to work toward the same goal. A friction develops between Sylvia and Jenny and the children by Gertrude’s illicit adventures as well as covert sexual similarities surfacing in her children and at ‘family meetings’ Gertrude doles out punishment for Sylvia – punishment including cigarette burns, coke bottle insertions, branding etc. – all of which are undeserved and eventually lead to Sylvia’s imprisonment in the basement where Gertrude and her children and their friends daily torture Sylvia. Eventually Sylvia dies and Gertrude and family are brought to court for charges of first-degree destroy and variations thereof. The court proceedings (under the leadership of lawyer Leroy K. Original played by Bradley Whitford) provide the chronicle drivers as each allegation is then acted out by flashbacks until the verdicts are reached.

Catherine Keener is salubrious as the deranged, maladaptive Gertrude and Ellen Page adds yet another feather to her cap in a role that in another actor’s hands could have been over the top. Writer/director Tommy O’Haver (the script was written with the support of Irene Turner) does manage to present us the facts of this atrocity yet fails to go inside the characters to give us the psychobiographies this film has the potential for illuminating. It may well repel some viewers, but it does bring to the forefront a crime that is all too popular in this country. Grady Harp, May 08

In the summer of 1965, two young girls, Sylvia Likens, age 16 and her slight sister Jennie, crippled with polio, were left by their itinerant parents in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski, a divorced mother of seven, in a blue-collar neighborhood in Indiana, who agreed to care for them for $20 a week while their parents traveled the carnival circuit. Three months later, Sylvia was dumb, and Gertrude Baniszewski was standing trial for first-degree cancel, accused of having engineered Sylvia’s death by torture.

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The film, “An American Crime”, shown on the Showtime cable channel, follows Sylvia’s last three months fairly closely. Gertrude Baniszewski, who may or may not have been playing with a rotund deck to inaugurate with, progressed from slaps and spankings when the benefit checks arrived slow, to more grotesque punishments after Sylvia “lied” about Baniszewski’s oldest daughter Paula being pregnant (Paula actually was pregnant by a married man), culminating in Sylvia being locked in the basement and systematically tortured not only by Gertrude Baniszewksi and six of her seven children (the baby was too young to participate), but also by several neighborhood children who stopped by from time to time after school to join in the fun. Even worse, Gertrude forced Jennie Likens to occupy share in abusing her sister, threatening to do the same thing to her if she didn’t. By the time Sylvia mercifully died of shock and abuse, there was hardly a square plod on her body that had not been lop, scalded, beaten, burned with cigarettes, or subjected to whatever torments the Baniszewskis could dream up, including scratching the words onto her abdomen with red-hot needles in letters two inches high “I’M A PROSTITUTE AND PROUD OF IT”. The movie notes that although Gertrude Baniszewski started this particular act, she was too squeamish to accomplish it, so she got one of the neighborhood boys, Ricky Hobbs, to do it for her.

The film tells the tale in a straightforward manner without any attempt to befriend us understand why these horrific events took region, and the director has reach under some criticism for this. Perhaps there was no attempt to account for why Sylvia had to go through such hell during the last three tormented months of her life because there is no explanation. One can sympathize with Gertrude Baniszewski up to a point; she was abandoned by her husband to bring seven children up alone with no child support; she was pregnant thirteen times resulting in seven children and six stillbirths or miscarriages; and her boyfriend was abusive to her; but millions of other women have gone through considerable worse than Gertrude Baniszewski has, and none, to my knowledge, has systematically tortured another human being to death. Was her circumstances to blame for her actions? I don’t judge so. Was her mental area to blame? Or was the awful hand she was dealt by life responsible? Again, how do you account for that millions of people have had it great worse than Gertrude Baniszewski without resorting to the level of unfriendly savagery with which she treated Sylvia Likens? Did she objective watch in Sylvia something she had hated all her life and was obvious to slay? We don’t know, and wisely, the director doesn’t do this as a reason for Baniszewski’s actions. The film also raises the inquire, which was never answered in the accurate case, of why the neighborhood children turned into willing, even interested, participants. What kind of enviromnent spawns children like this?

The acting in the film is uniformly marvelous across the board, with Ellen Page turning in a sensitive and well-nuanced performance as Sylvia and Catherine Keener giving a chilling portrayal of Gertrude Baniszewski. I didn’t feel the movie was being made for its shock value, although what happened to Sylvia was gruesome enough, nor do I fault the director for not indulging in specious “explanations” for the inexplicable. The film does raise a distinguished larger question: was Gertrude Baniszewski mentally ill or was she impartial humdrum unfavorable? Is wrong a compose of mental illness or an entity in itself? One can argue that put a question to endlessly and rep nowhere. We’re left with a lot of unanswered questions, and perhaps this is what unsettles so many people who explore this movie. Some things don’t have any explanation, or at least an explanation we want to secure. Sometimes even the perpetrators are left at a loss. “Sylvia wanted something,” Gertrude Baniszewski said during her trial for which she was ultimately convicted of abolish and spent twenty years in jail before being paroled in 1985, “but I could never procure out what it was.” Perhaps Sylvia unprejudiced wanted to be treated like another human being.

Judy Lind
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