Keane
Photos
Directed: Lodge H. Kerrigan
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Drama, Thriller
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0420291
Summary
A man in his early 30s (Keane) struggles with the supposed loss of his daughter from port authority bus terminal in new york, while fighting serious battles with schizophrenia. We can never be sure if the loss is real or imaginary; or whether his overt interest in helping young girls is innocent and of a fatherly nature, or is of a darker, scarier motive. The film is about a search for family, belonging, and the overwhelming need for human connection. it is a disturbing and thought provoking story about real characters dealing with every day life. keanes quest for his daughter and Kiras (Kira is a young girl he befriends) longing for a nuclear family is what connects them and the audience to a heartbreaking story...
Movie Reviews
Lodge Kerrigan is one of the great, though largely unheralded, filmmakers of our time, and with Keane, his third feature, he finally shows himself to be in full command of his uncompromising talent. Kerrigan’s movies (Clean, Shaven; Claire Dolan)
are not for the squeamish. His protagonists have been schizophrenics
and self-destructive obsessives – people at the ends of their rope or
teetering on the edge of insanity. Unstable, unpredictable,
unfathomable, and because of these qualities Kerrigan’s characters
generate stories filled with tension and suspense. Kerrigan’s films
become thrillers in the purest sense: His characters create dangerous
situations that become further untethered by the unpredictability of
their actions. In his two previous films, Kerrigan helped us to get
inside of each character’s mindset, providing a visceral sense of the
madness that encompasses them.
With Keane, the filmmaker makes
the leap into creating a true psychological thriller, although it
should be said that the film will still not be for all tastes. The
character of Keane is the type of person we prefer to keep at a
distance, onscreen as in life. In fact, the opening scenes show William
Keane (Lewis) in full pandemonium mode, skittering through New York’s
Port Authority bus terminal showing a news clipping about his
6-year-old daughter, who was abducted from the terminal six months
earlier, to counter attendants or anyone who’ll listen. Most respond
kindly but extract themselves from Keane’s presence as quickly as
possible. We gradually learn that Keane continuously returns to the
scene of the crime. He lives on disability in a rundown transient hotel
in Jersey when he’s not sleeping like a derelict on the street. He
sometimes tries to drown his sorrow with beer, cocaine, and anonymous
sex, and he talks aloud to himself almost constantly. His rant reveals
that he’s aware that he needs to make himself look presentable to
search for his daughter, and he stops to buy the girl a new dress. We
wonder whether the child really exists, or whether he actually had
anything to do with her disappearance.
How can we trust the reliability
of his story? Yet if his tale of woe is accurate, this father has every
reason in the world to be out of his mind with grief. Largely filmed
with a hand-held camera by DP John Foster, Keane is always tightly
framed in the shot, with little in the foreground and soft focus in the
background. We are totally within Keane’s unstable world, and it’s an
extremely unpleasant and precarious place to dwell. After a while, a
down-on-their-luck mother and daughter (Ryan and Breslin) move into
Keane’s hotel and a friendship forms, and eventually Keane is asked to
babysit the 7-year-old. Although he’s able to pull it together for a
bit and appear quite sane, we inevitably wonder what will happen in the
long-term.
There’s not much more storyline to this thriller than this,
yet it’s a nail-biter all the way. Lewis (Band of Brothers)
delivers a sensational performance in a movie that is thoroughly
dependent on his work. Actually, the film is more of a three-way affair
among Lewis, Kerrigan, and Foster. They sink in their hooks and don’t
let go of the viewer until the very last minute. Kerrigan has found a
way to preserve the insularity of his protagonist’s point of view while
keeping the needs of the audience in mind.
2005-11-04, Marjorie Baumgarten