It was inevitable that the Amanda Knox story would be dramatized on cable. Lifetime's movie Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial on Italy (out on DVD) is prosaically titled and strains at times to yank those heart strings. And yet, it offers a remarkably sophisticated perspective on the age old question of how do we know what we know—whether about events, people or their motivations.
The movie stars fresh faced Hayden Panettiere as Amanda and Marcia Gay Harden as her neurotic, doting mom. At first Amanda is depicted as the fun-loving American, an innocent abroad. When she arrives at the idyllic, tile-roofed medieval village of Perugia, everything falls easily in place. Amanda rents a house with two other women students with a terrace opening to a postcard view of the Italian countryside. Then she finds a seemingly sensitive, sophisticated boyfriend from a wealthy Italian family. But her dream turns into nightmare when her British roommate is murdered. The Italian police come to suspect her; her boyfriend turns her in; and Amanda tries to finger her employer, a bar owner of African origin who eventually produces a solid alibi for his whereabouts on the night of the murder. Amanda's story isn't holding up as well.
The Knox case gained such wide currency in America in part because her family invested in a PR campaign (a media crusade that left Italy unmoved) and because a year abroad has become a common right of passage for the children of privilege. Many parents suffer anxiety over their kids falling into a foreign jail or bad foreign company. Amanda stumbled into both.
While the Lifetime movie seems at first in Amanda's corner, the circumstantial evidence against her, the duplicitous behavior of her boyfriend and her strangely glib attitude in the face of a brutal murder (and possible rape) down the hall from her bedroom argues for the other side. The screenplay grants that most of the Italian officials believed they were pursuing justice. That the court convicted her Italian boyfriend along with her (as well as a third party, another African expatriate) belies the U.S. media's assumption that Amanda was being railroaded for being American. In Lifetime's telling, there was plenty of doubt to go around, and Amanda's behavior was hardly above suspicion or reproach.
Was Amanda Knox the evil vixen of British tabloid headlines (the U.K. press hated her) or the sweet American exchange student of U.S. talk shows? Perhaps her employer, the man she tried to send down the river, had it right: “Amanda isn't evil. To be evil, you must have a soul,” he said. “She's empty—dead inside.”
