Film: Keane
Director: Lodge Kerrigan
At first I felt this was going to be a pretentious take on a child abduction story. The director was truly in love with Damian Lewis. Lewis' face occupies the majority of the frame in each shot, I wanted to lean around him to see what was going on nearby. All the shots are taken with a single hand-held camera, close and unsteady. I felt I was being subjected to another devote of the 24-esque Shaky Cam.
However after watching for a bit this film offered a new perspective. I first thought something was odd when I noticed that Keane, a distraught father obsessed with an abducted daughter, was searching for his kid by showing a battered, wrinkled, black-and-white newspaper clipping. I discounted this as a failing of the production. Wouldn't a father have a sharp color photograph of his child to show passersby?
This wound up being the first small indication of a depth in this film that I may have been discounting due to a personal stigma towards the style of cinematography. After a few minutes I was paying less attention to the story being told by the actions, and becoming more and more fascinated with Lewis' potrayal of Keane.
The reason that the camera never leaves Lewis' face is that the film is not documenting a father searching for his lost daughter, rather it is about the staggering solitude that someone with a mental disability must experience in the modern world.
Keane is not right in the head. The character is one of the best representations of what it must feel like to be a person with serious mental problems abandoned in a today's cities. Keane cashing his disability check shows that he's been diagnosed, but tossed aside. His practicing his life story in his hotel room further reinforces the idea that this is a man scrambling to keep some kind of touch with reality. I haven't seen a portrayal of schizophrenia as convincing as this since watching Ralph Fiennes in Spider. After a while I felt annoyed when the camera would leave Keane. It seemed an unwelcome bit of tempo to be torn away from him, like an unwanted commercial break on television.
I absolutely love the use of purely situational music. The only music in this movie is that which is being heard by the characters. Incidental music (as Lynne Ramsay has said) is used far too often as an emotional crutch, to supply feeling in a scene where the director fails to achieve it with the story, cinematography or acting. There is one scene in this film with Keane yelling at a bartender to raise the volume on a jukebox that shows how well music can play a narrative role in a film, rather than simply the empathetic caulk most directors splatter it around as. The bit with Keane in the bar brought to mind the final scene in Morvern Callar, where Morvern is walking in a club, but listening to music given to her by her dead boyfriend in order to purge herself of guilt and move on. Keane isn't quite as successful in this endeavor.
It's not a perfect film by any means. Whereas at the end of Spider we understand how Fiennes' has reached the point he is at, we are given little background on Keane. By the third act you have little sympathy for Keane, and rather want to punch him dead in the face. Seriously.
The film also seems to be hampered a bit by the point at which we enter Keane's life. As a contrast, take the French film L´Emploi Du Temps (I actually linked the whole film as it's easier to find on YouTube than the crappy American trailer). Here we follow the collapse of a normal man. We follow step-by-step, little-slip by little-slip as he descends from being a normal family man to the mental mess he transforms into. In Keane, we are only given the final result. This seems a bit of a disservice to Lewis' textured interpretation of the character. If we had been given a little of the insight that Lewis had as to Keane's back-story we might appreciate his portrayal more. As it stands it's still a fantastic performance, just viewed behind a fog of artistic ambiguity.
And I know I'm rambling on this one, but I wanted to say one word about Abigail Breslin. Her greatest talent was not caring that cameras were rolling. In Signs and this film she comes across as natural and sincere, not through any artifice or particular genius on her part, but more not caring she was being watched. It a shame this was not cultivated and she is now delegated to movie spinoffs of Hasbro toys.
Rating: 7.3/10
Favorite bit: When Kira's mother says, "You didn't have to wash the dishes". The look on her face spoke volumes.
Reminds me of:
No comments:
Post a Comment