Dir. Lodge Kerrigan, USA, 2004, 100 mins
Cast: Damien Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryan
Review by Peter Fraser
This outstanding film deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience. Damien Lewis gives a memorably intense performance in his central role as the psychologically disturbed Keane who periodically returns to the bus station in which he claims his daughter vanished some six months before the film commences. The film begins and ends in the bus station, emphasising the cyclical nature of Keane’s obsession to such an extent that we feel that everything which happens in the narrative may have happened a number of times before, whether Keane’s daughter was really abducted or not.
It’s up to the audience to decide upon the veracity of Keane’s account, although I for one find the film all the more moving and compelling if we accept its truth. Whatever - it’s clear that the success of Keane depends upon two elements: Damien Lewis and director Lodge Kerrigan. Kerrigan trains his camera on Lewis’s expressive features for almost the entire duration of the film so that we can hardly prevent ourselves from identifying with his tortured psyche or sharing in his forlorn crusade to find his missing daughter. With long takes and the camera in such constant close proximity to its title character we have the opportunity to subject Lewis’ extraordinary performance to intense scrutiny. It’s clear that Kerrigan’s nervy strategy, which makes the film such a triumph, would have collapsed with a lesser actor who was unable to draw us into Keane’s melancholy world.
Who hasn’t felt lost? Who hasn’t imagined returning to the scene of a past trauma, perhaps to finally ‘make things right’? To that extent we can all identify with Keane’s predicament and appreciate just how suddenly any of our lives could irreversibly change. Seeking solace in casual sex, drugs and alcohol, staying in an anonymous motel, Keane can’t move forward because he is anchored on a past trauma that can never be resolved unless his daughter is found. He blames himself for what happened. He wants to rewind his life to make things different - the sex, alcohol and drugs are simultaneously a doomed attempt to escape and a self-chastising means to destroy himself by immolating his mind and degrading his body – but instead he skips backwards and forwards, stuck on pause.
Among the most moving moments of Keane are those in which Lewis’ character tries to reach out to a girl who reminds him of his daughter, fleetingly forming a relationship with the girl’s mother. Given the desperate straits of all three it might seem a pathetic parody of a nuclear family but it also provides us with a lacerating insight into the person Keane may have been as a father and husband, and the person he might be again.
It also leads to some of the film’s most discomforting scenes as Keane returns to the bus station with the girl to re-enact his daughter’s abduction. Clearly one way out of the otherwise inescapable trauma of losing a child might be to take another, but in doing so Keane is in danger of becoming his mirror image: the victimiser rather than the victim. The closing seconds are somewhat redemptive but one senses that the journey isn’t finished for Keane. His odyssey returns to the same place. His missing daughter is the North Pole to his behavioural compass. It’s a tribute to Lewis and Kerrigan that we care so much and this film’s deep humanity, its empathy and its realism, ensure its power.
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