Two of her daughters meet some new girls at church, whose parents run a travelling carnival. The new girls' parents and Gertrude do each other a favor: they will pay her to take care of their girls while they continue working on the carnival circuit for a few months. It is one of the new girls, Sylvia (Ellen Page) who serves as a sort of narrator.
The film is told in flashback from a court trial. Gertrude has money troubles and problems managing all her kids, especially a teenaged daughter who is running around with a married man, even though she herself hasn’t made good choices in men either.
Gertrude does something despicable when she doesn’t get any new payments from the parents: she punishes the new girls for their parents’ apparent mistake/neglect. Bit by bit the family falls apart and Gertrude, and, increasingly her kids, begins abusing Sylvia viciously for a variety of reasons, mostly to get out their respective anger at their own situations rather than for anything that Sylvia has done against them.
It’s amazing how Gertrude keeps getting deeper and deeper and the kids (and more and more kids) get duped, cowed and coerced by her behavior. Some of the kids are fairly old so their sense of morals or learned behavior may have already been ingrained from Gertrude's past treatment of them. But why hasn't one of them broken away sooner from this destructive home. At the trial, all the kids who are testifying seem to show little remorse or understanding of how bad their behaviors are. And Gertrude doesn’t seem to think beyond the time when Sylvia’s parents will return. The film alludes to something which appears that Sylvia's parents have been paying for her care all along, and if so, then Gertrude’s behavior is really inexplicable and unfounded. Poor Sylvia is betrayed by everyone, and when she is finally helped it seems too little, too late. The ending is a little too neat and manufactured, probably since the film says the events were taken from the court transcripts.
Actor Bradley Whitford plays the prosecuting lawyer, he gets to do typical lawyering stuff but not much real acting as all he does is question the people at the trial in a stern voice and not much in the way of real interaction with characters, so kind of a waste for a noted actor to be in this role. Ellen Page does portray a good teenager, showing both a youthfulness with emotional maturity, and eventual hardness and suffering. Catherine Keener begins as a typical character, a sexually loose abuse victim, often blaming others for her problems and choices in life, but projecting her problems and faults on others and punishing them as a result. Nick Searcy, whom I really like in several things, has a small part as Sylvia’s father, and Michael O’Keefe also has a small part as the local reverend. Evan Peters does a good part playing a local boy who first likes Sylvia then spends way too much time with Gertrude when Sylvia spurns him.
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