NETWORK: Showtime
AIR DATE: May 10, 2008
STARRING: Ellen Page, Catherine Keener, Hayley McFarland, Aru Graynor, Evan Peters, Bradley Whitford, and James Franco
WRITTEN BY: Tommy O'Haver & Irene Turner
DIRECTED BY: Tommy O'Haver

If you've recently read the story of that sick bastard in Austria who kept his daughter locked in his basement and treated her like a piece of human garbage and said to yourself, "That can't happen in my town," consider if you will the shocking case of Gertrude Baniszewski and her neighborhood of deviants in the fall of 1965. Gertrude was a divorcee in Indiana who desperately needed money to raise her own extended family. She was lonely, stressed out, and more than a little crazy and paranoid. She agreed to watch two local children for a while during their parent's road trip with the circus for cash. When Gertrude became convinced that one of the children, Sylvia Likens, was spreading false rumors about her daughter, she completely snapped. She started by spanking the two girls, moved to burning Sylvia with cigarettes, and then it got really, horrifyingly ugly. Eventually, Sylvia was thrown into the basement, where Gertrude not only beat, burned, and sexually abused her but encouraged her own children and some from the neighborhood to do the same. And they did! Discuss amongst yourself whether it's sicker that one woman abused a child that wasn't hers or that local peers of Sylvia were so bored and demented that they played along with the game. It makes anyone with a soul nauseous to read about what really happened in that house of horrors.

This horrifying tale, one of the first of its kind in the States, has been turned into a film twice, once in The Girl Next Door, now on DVD, and in An American Crime, airing on Showtime this week, starring Oscar nominees Catherine Keener and Ellen Page. The Tommy O'Haver film originally played at Sundance 2007 in hopes of a theatrical release but critics there were very hard on the film and, watching it now on Showtime, it's easy to see what scared distributors away and why the Park City reaction was so negative. It's not what you might first think. An American Crime isn't a gory, horrifying experience (like Girl Next Door, the horror movie version to this more dramatic take), but it's a mess on a structural level and shockingly poorly directed and written. As Baniszewski, the always-great Catherine Keener just barely makes An American Crime worth seeing, but Ellen Page (as Sylvia) and James Franco blend into the unrealistically rendered scenery. The fatal flaw of An American Crime is that, except for the occasional decision by Keener, NONE of it feels real. It's like those Dateline reenactments, always just a shade left of feeling genuine. A few facts of the case have been altered (mostly softened, perhaps knowing that the true horrors were too much for an audience to bear) and the entire proceeding has the feeling of recreation, like you're always watching a movie. Considering the horrors that took place in the Baniszewski basement, it's a sign of the failure of An American Crime that the film is never once emotionally moving. This should be the kind of hard-to-take story that hits you in the gut but it never once does.

At its core, An American Crime features a fascinating case about a demented woman whose mental illness fed into the boredom of a community looking for something to do. The true story was a shocking wake-up call to the world that even the woman who went to church every week and seemed like a proper guardian to her children was an absolute monster. There are sick, twisted people behind even the most unoffensive facades and it's a shame that An American Crime not only wastes excellent work by Ms. Keener but a story as powerful as this one on cliches and behavior that just feels false. There's rarely a moment in An American Crime that rings true and who wants to spend time with such a dark corner of our history if it's not going to feel believable, especially when there's an all-too-real monster making headlines right now?