American Crime

May 24, 2017

The acting is usually good and the individual plots are for the most part strong, but because of the multiple threads, neither the plots nor the characters are developed much. A bit over-orchestrated and at times too close to being a soap-opera, and the final scene is simply both too easy and too heavy. The plots involve overlapping characters, but the plots do not interlock, and the result is a strong sense of authorial manipulation in creating a theme. This sense becomes overwhelming when all of the accused from each thread are brought together, by complete coincidence, before the same judge on the same day, in the same courtroom. I liked many of the scenes, but each of the plots could have become a separate film. Collecting them together and interweaving them seemed to have little purpose–they did not comment on each other. In each, the victimized are further victimized and the bad folks are caught and may or may not be redeemed. That last part is the most worrisome. The shows sympathies really seemed to be more with the middle-class and well-to-do than with the victims, since much more screen time was given to them, and the script as concerned with questions over the saving of their marriages as with the deaths and disfigurement of the victims.