Ellen Gray: 'Trial' a murky flick about Amanda Knox murder case

AMANDA KNOX: MURDER ON TRIAL IN ITALY. 9 tonight, Lifetime.

MOST OF US know by now, don't we, that seeing isn't always believing?

But when it comes to movies "based on a true story," it can be easy to forget.

Unless you happen to be one of the people whose "true story" is being told without your permission or involvement.

That's the situation for the subject of tonight's Lifetime movie, "Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy," which stars Hayden Panettiere ("Heroes") as Knox and Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden as her mother, and purports to be a fact-based account of the case of the American student convicted of killing her British roommate in Perugia, Italy, four years ago.

Knox's lawyers, who are in the midst of an appeal of her 26-year sentence, demanded, apparently without success, that Lifetime cancel tonight's presentation, fearful it might hurt their case.

You can see where they might worry. Knox has been charged with slander, for saying that she was hit during questioning, and last week her parents were ordered to stand trial for repeating that.

The family of Knox's alleged victim, Meredith Kercher, whose death is depicted, is reportedly also opposed to the movie.

And the people who made it?

"We didn't talk with either family," executive producer Trevor Walton said at a news conference last month when I asked if Knox's family had been involved. "We worked from an incredible amount of material from the courtroom itself, from all the press. . . . So we pieced it together as impartially as possible."

And so they did, if impartiality means that after two hours, you'll have no better idea than you might have now if Knox did what she and two others are said to have done to another young woman whose portrait here is even sketchier.

Let's be real: Impartiality makes for poor moviemaking.

I haven't yet seen the miniseries "The Kennedys," which the History Channel ordered and then rejected because - depending who you believe - it wasn't historically accurate enough or because the Kennedy family objected to the way that producer Joel Surnow ("24"), one of Hollywood's more open conservatives, presented their family's story.

Maybe I'll feel differently when I've seen it - it begins showing on ReelzChannel on April 3 - but I'm thinking that there's not much that Surnow could dredge up about the Kennedys that should shock anyone. As a family, they've supplied a lot of material.

And even history-based drama requires a point of view.

"The Social Network" isn't a great film because it's the totally factual account of the founding of Facebook. You may or may not approve, but the character who was a stand-in for "Social Network" screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in last week's episode of CBS' "The Good Wife" did a decent job of explaining why facts sometimes aren't allowed to get in the way of a good story.

But if Mark Zuckerberg, instead of being rich beyond most people's dreams, were locked in an Italian jail cell in a case this murky, I'd like to think that a screenwriter of Sorkin's caliber would've passed on the chance to muddy the waters further, especially if it could do harm.

And muddy the waters is really what "Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy" does.

Panettiere as Knox comes off as both sweet and spoiled, boy-crazy and yet in love, independent but whiny - in other words, full of the same contradictions and quirks of people who haven't been accused of killing anyone.

Yet when you see her turning cartwheels while waiting to be interrogated, or making out with her boyfriend shortly after Kercher's body is discovered, it stirs the pot.

Parts of the script were drawn from a 400-page description of the court case prepared by the judge after the trial, according to Walton, who called it a "huge piece of the puzzle."

"We spent five weeks . . . every day talking about it and talking about it and reading about it and looking at new evidence, trying to form some sort of opinion about it," Panettiere said of working on the movie, mostly filmed in and around Rome.

"And it's like she's innocent; she's guilty; she's innocent; she's guilty; she's innocent," she said. "I can't say that I have an opinion, and that's why the story is so interesting. I don't know that we'll ever really know."

"I never wanted this movie to find new facts," said director Robert Dornhelm. "We are not detectives. . . . Who are we? We are filmmakers. We just wanted to tell a dramatic story."