By Harry Haun
15 Oct 2010

	Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell in "Conviction"
	photo by Ron Batzdorf

Rockwell, who appeared in Broadway's A Behanding in Spokane in 2009-10, is currently being talked up for an Oscar for his complex, anguished and wholly unsentimental portrayal of the incarcerated Kenny. That performance is one of two things Goldwyn says he is proudest of about the picture. "I've always known how great Sam is, and I'm very happy to be able to show that to people."

The other thing concerns the film's real-life heroine, who shelved the law books after winning her brother his freedom. "Betty Anne still runs Aidan's Pub in Bristol, RI, and works pro bono on cases for the New England Innocence Project — cases like Kenny's — and she works nationally with the Innocence Project on legislative reform.

"What I'm most proud of, I think, is that I was able to give her the gift of the movie — to know that she felt that it was emotionally honest and that it told the truth and represented her life in a way that honors her. It has been such a long journey."

"Conviction" does tell the truth, as far as it goes. The story has a tragic postscript which Goldwyn saw fit to spare the audience. Six months after his 18 years in prison, Kenny Waters died in a freak accident, trying to scale a 15-foot-high cinder-block retaining wall. "Kenny was like an overgrown kid. He was 47 years old and weighed about 300 pounds, and he fell on his head and died of a brain hemorrhage.

"I had this in the film for a while. I really debated long and hard whether and how to dramatize Kenny's death. It was in the script for a number of years. To me, I wanted it in the movie because I felt that was what the movie was about. It's about the transcendence of love over adversity and suffering — and, to me, even with Kenny's death, the love that he and Betty Anne shared transcended the tragedy of that. It made her life and her achievement a triumphant thing. However, when people read the script, they were still moved and carried away by their love, but, when it came to Kenny's death, they were completely derailed by it. They just couldn't recover, and the movie became about something very different than I wanted it to be about. Finally, about a year before we went into production, I made the decision to take it out. I decided that wasn't what the movie was about. And then I experimented with putting it in the end crawl, and the audience reacted the same way so I took it out."

Ah, if life only had the grace to fade away, like the movies, with a happy ending.

Tony Goldywn talks to Betty Anne Waters about the project: