Voyeuristic peek at a 'Crime'

There is a lot of craft and some art in Showtime's "An American Crime," but I question whether the world needs even a well-made movie about the torture and murder of a 16-year-old girl. As a story of child abuse, it's too sensational and aberrational to shed much light on the more commonplace -- to use an unfortunately apt word -- instances of that problem. As a story based in fact -- the teenager is killed by an Indianapolis woman, her children and their friends -- it's too much imagined to illuminate the actual events. And as a meditation on human evil and frailty, it fails to go very deep, though it does provide the framework for a number of good performances, with Ellen Page as the victim and Catherine Keener as her tormentor.

As if preemptively acknowledging the difficulty of his situation, director Tommy O'Haver calls the film -- which premieres tonight -- an "interpretation" of what a prosecuting attorney termed "the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana." In the summer of 1965, Sylvia Likens and her 15-year-old sister, Jenny, who was disabled by polio, were left by their carnival-worker parents in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski, a divorced mother of seven. After a support check from the Likens failed to arrive, Baniszewski beat the sisters, beginning a series of increasingly severe and perverse punishments, for mostly imagined or exaggerated crimes, that came to focus exclusively on Sylvia.

What made the case more remarkable is that many of these punishments were meted out by Baniszewski's children and their friends. At some point the abuse devolved into what seems to have been a kind of neighborhood sport that included beatings, kickings, burnings, brandings and a host of worse things we don't need to go into here and some of which O'Haver has generously left out of his movie. By the end of October, Sylvia was dead.

A director not known for his darker sensibilities, O'Haver ("Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss," "Ella Enchanted") is clearly righteous in his intent. He wants to honor and not to exploit Sylvia Likens, if it's possible for him to do the one without the other, and he grew up in Indianapolis and so might be allowed a sort of regional right to the story. With co-writer Irene Turner, he has come up with something of a thesis, that (as I read it) Baniszewski did what she did out of a perverse, paranoid mothering instinct.