Keane
| Year: | 2007 |
| Production Co: | Canary Films |
| Director: | Lodge Kerrigan |
| Producer: | Steven Soderbergh |
| Cast: | Damian Lewis, Abagail Breslin |
It looked like it was going to be a classic, and it was - of directing and performance but little else. Lewis is front and centre and larger than life in almost every frame, bristling with attention deficit tension and barely controlled anger, and you spend the whole film waiting for him to explode and something terrible to happen.
Together with director Kerrigan's warzone-style handheld camerawork, we're given a picture of a man gone mad, simmering with barely contained, antisocial violence.
As a story it's much less satisfying, purposefully avoiding answering all your questions. Does Keane find his missing daughter? Does she even exist? And just what does his friendship with single mother Lyn and virtual abduction of her daughter Kira (starlet-in-waiting Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine) mean?
We meet Keane stumbling menacingly around a city bus station former where his little girl was abducted there some time before. As the film movies on Keane gets himself into more trouble in a series of disturbing vignettes. He thinks he's found her kidnapper and violently accosts a man on the street, shags some drunken slut in a nightclub toilet cubicle and nearly loses it dancing to a tune in a bar.
And the more we see of him, the more we think he's really crazy, that his daughter might have gone missing years before and he haunts the place convinced he's going to find her, or that she might never have existed.
Taut and tense, a good exercise in filmmaking but unsatisfying if you like to know. And at least it's great work for Lewis, who since Band of Brothers has appeared in nothing but crap.
Together with director Kerrigan's warzone-style handheld camerawork, we're given a picture of a man gone mad, simmering with barely contained, antisocial violence.
As a story it's much less satisfying, purposefully avoiding answering all your questions. Does Keane find his missing daughter? Does she even exist? And just what does his friendship with single mother Lyn and virtual abduction of her daughter Kira (starlet-in-waiting Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine) mean?
We meet Keane stumbling menacingly around a city bus station former where his little girl was abducted there some time before. As the film movies on Keane gets himself into more trouble in a series of disturbing vignettes. He thinks he's found her kidnapper and violently accosts a man on the street, shags some drunken slut in a nightclub toilet cubicle and nearly loses it dancing to a tune in a bar.
And the more we see of him, the more we think he's really crazy, that his daughter might have gone missing years before and he haunts the place convinced he's going to find her, or that she might never have existed.
Taut and tense, a good exercise in filmmaking but unsatisfying if you like to know. And at least it's great work for Lewis, who since Band of Brothers has appeared in nothing but crap.