Keane

Lodge Kerrigan, USA, 2004
Three and a half stars

This film is a very interesting and risky experiment that thankfully works quite well. I suppose it has been done before somewhere by someone, but I myself have not seen very many art films that focus entirely on one man to the extent that, for perhaps the majority of the film, his head and shoulders fill up most of the frame! This character has lost his daughter and, to put it lightly, isn’t dealing with loss very well, and director Lodge Kerrigan creates a really wrenching effect by preventing you from looking away from this guy. Just as importantly, actor Damian Lewis is clearly up to the challenge of having to be the entire movie (although his child co-star is quite good too). Plot developments come as a surprise, but for the most part I wasn’t sitting there waiting for them, I was engrossed in the character’s seemingly aimless trajectory through his own misery. I think there are limits to how far this kind of filmmaking can go (by which I mean, I wouldn’t want to watch too many films like this), but I was generally more receptive to this than I expected, although my mind did wander at times. The end, however, is perfectly calibrated in tone and sentiment, which was almost surprising considering that films like this tend to have very unsatisfying endings (although it would be misleading to say I was “satisfied” in the traditional sense).

Source: Magnolia DVD
19 April, 8:57 PM