An American Crime (2007)

An American Crime arrived at Sundance in 2007 with a distributor that promptly fell apart, which sent a film about the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens directly to the Showtime network the following year. Tommy O'Haver directs with a flat, unblinking camera, and Catherine Keener plays Gertrude Baniszewski, an impoverished Indianapolis mother who agrees to board two carnival workers' daughters for twenty dollars a week and then, when the checks run late, begins the long descent into atrocity. It is a grim piece of work, competently assembled, and it has the good sense not to pretend the story means anything larger than itself.

The cruelty here is domestic, petty, and local. A woman's humiliation curdles into violence, and the neighborhood children are invited down to the basement to join in. The film lets poverty sit as a personal misfortune, lets the church stand as a failed witness, and never converts either into an argument about systems. The camera observes the branding needle and the cigarette burns without commentary. There is no thesis being advanced, no audience being scolded, no lesson appended to the closing credits. The horror is old, and the film treats it as old.

For those of us who keep the cultural ledger, the picture offers almost nothing to record. The cast is white because the case was white. The female leads suffer and inflict suffering without any framework of gendered critique. There is no identity theme, no environmental concern, no economic sermon, no celebration of diverse bodies, no neurodiverse interiority, no reinterpretation of the historical record. It is a dramatization of court transcripts, and it stays there. The account balances at zero, which for a film this bleak is its own kind of honesty.

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