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Keane (2004)

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From Time Out London

Lodge Kerrigan’s third feature is a fine portrait of madness in the modern city and one that’s marked by a frenetic, possessed performance from Damien Lewis in a title role that barely sees him leave the screen for a second. Kerrigan’s style of storytelling is to leap in and stay close: an agitated thirtysomething, William Keane (Lewis), is showing a photo of his young daughter to the ticket sellers at a New York bus station and explaining, with the help of a newspaper cutting, that he lost her at the same spot a year before. He wanders around the station, muttering wildly to himself and desperately trying to retrace his steps on the day that he lost his child. The camera stays close to Lewis – so close that you can almost smell his breath – and it’s only some minutes later, when our subject walks dangerously between cars and hollers his daughter’s name – ‘Sophie! Sophie!’ – that we recognise him as the type of person we see all the time in the city and usually dismiss as just another nutter.

Kerrigan’s goal is to play with our preconceptions of madness by only ever allowing our impressions of Keane to be as steady as Keane’s mental state. Later in the film, when he befriends a mother (Amy Ryan) and daughter (Abigail Breslin) who live in the same cheap hotel, Keane seems calm, reasonable, loving, but our knowledge of his earlier violence disturbs us, not least when he appears at his most tender, tucking the little girl into bed or helping her to shampoo her hair. Kerrigan’s New York is a bleak place that consumes its weaker souls whole. If you can make it here, Kerrigan argues, you’re one lucky fellow.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 1883: September 20-27 2006

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