Title: Keane
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Cast: Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryan …
Director: Lodge Kerrigan
Release: (2004)
There are three truisms in Hollywood today that you can feel comfortable swearing to on your children’s lives, if you’re ever asked to: (1) getting caught aging is worse for your career than getting caught with a transsexual prostitute, (2) there are more prominent leading men in the closet about their hair loss today than were in the closet about their homosexuality in the fifties, and (3) Steven Soderbergh always attaches himself to quality. So it should come as no surprise to anyone to learn that it was Soderbergh’s backing that launched Lodge Kerrigan’s 2004, uncomfortably mesmerizing, psychological drama, Keane.
Keane follows closely a time in the life of a thirty-something man named William Keane (Damian Lewis), spanning his journey through a dark valley of creeping psychosis that bridges the gap from one devastating crisis of conscience to another. When we first meet Keane he is a man slowly losing his mind, and control of his life, as he struggles to deal with the abduction and loss of his young daughter. As we follow him further into the abyss, we can only watch helplessly as he is mentally drawn-and-quartered by the tightening grips of alcohol, depression, dementia and temptation right before our eyes. Complicating the audience’s anxiety even more, is that the truth about his own past soon begins to become less and less clear, while the truth about his future intentions become more and more uncomfortably so.
While the entire cast of Keane will keep you entrenched in the drama with their own spot-on performances, it is the drumskin-tight portrayal of Keane by Damian Lewis that blurs the line between fact and fiction in a way that reminds us with striking clarity of what acting really is, and how often we really don’t see it in movies anymore.
If I had to draw one negative from the film, and I’m not even sure this is a negative, I would say that the entire trajectory of the film was wholly reminiscent of The Machinist, wherein I think it was done slightly better. But still, Keane is an unusually captivating film which is different enough to be worth anyone’s time and money.
Grading
Story: A
Acting: A+
Visuals: B-
Originality/Innovation: A-
Enjoyability: Tricky, the fact that it was often uncomfortable to watch (which therefore would by definition not be ‘enjoyable’) was one of the attribute that made it a triumph as a film. – Let’s say B-.
DVD Extras: B (Soderbergh includes an alternate cut retelling the story as he might have, had he directed it, which is good – but that’s really the only extra there is)
Overall: A-
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