KEANE: CLEAN, SHAVEN PART TWO

At this point Rebecca H. (Lodge Kerrigan's latest film) is just a myth as far as I'm concerned. It still doesn’t have a release date, there's like ONE review on it and only two short clips on YouTube that don’t reveal much. To deal with my anticipation for this movie I've decided to revisit the world of Lodge Kerrigan hoping that by the time I'm done, Rebecca H. will get a distributor. Keane (2004) feels like a slightly different retelling of Kerrigan's first film; Clean, Shaven (1994). I know it’s common for filmmakers to explore similar territory in their work: Roman Polanski (a huge influence on Kerrigan) had his “apartment trilogy” (Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby & The Tenant), a lot of Michael Haneke's work deals with a lot of the same themes (depression, boredom, isolation, suicide, etc) and David Lynch's Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive & Inland Empire could be considered a loose trilogy (the three movies, all set in L.A./Hollywood, tell the story of a character transforming in to another person). For those of you who don’t feel like reading my write-up on Clean, Shaven, it’s a subjective film about a paranoid schizophrenic ("Peter") trying to track down his daughter after being released from a mental institution. Keane is about a paranoid schizophrenic ("Keane") trying to find his daughter who was kidnapped from the port authority bus terminal. The biggest difference between the two films is that Clean, Shaven is much more subjective, aggresive and experimental whereas Keane is a bit more straight forward (although by the end of it the subjectivity kicks in and you question if his daughter really was kidnapped or if she even existed to begin with). Both films have that same raw, "realistic", gritty feel (although Clean, Shaven is a bit more gritty looking because it was shot on film with a smaller budget in the early 90's while Keane was shot digitally in 2004 giving it a slightly more polished look...but still still realistic). Both films feature a minimal cast of supporting actors and the dialogue in both films is a lot less than your average script.

Like any film by Lodge Kerrigan, Keane is also filled with plenty of tense and uncertain moments that leave you feeling uneasy right down to its open ending…

But at the same time this is the least "threatening" work he's done so far in comparison to something like Clean, Shaven or the very tense Claire Dolan. ...Or is it?
It was my friend Warren Anderson of the Inside The Phoenix podcast that put a slightly different perspective on Keane...
I've worked with children almost half my life but still to this day I have none of my own so the fear I have of a child being abducted doesn't come close to the fear that an actual parent would.
At my suggestion. Warren & his wife (who have a young daughter together) watched Keane but couldn't finish it because they said the movie made them feel uneasy. I like to think that's a compliment to this movie on some level (although I'm sure Lodge Kerrigan would prefer people watch Keane from beginning to end).
You don't have to be a parent in order to feel the impact of this movie, but I imagine it certainly heightens the viewing the experience.
I'm sure a big motivation behind the making of Keane was the loss of Kerrigan's 2002 film; In God’s Hands (another film about child abduction starring Peter Saarsgard and Maggie Gyllenhall that was wrapped but abandoned because of major negative damage to the film). In that kinda situation, the loss of a feature length movie that you worked on for a year, you either fall in to a depression and kill yourself or you bounce back and quickly make another film. Kerrigan chose the latter...

I bounced back pretty quickly. I think there was a 2-year period between that (In God’s Hands) and this (Keane). I wrote a new script. Steven (Soderbergh) went out and got it financed. It is a very devastating thing to happen, and the most devastating thing for me was how so many individuals turned their back on it, and ran for cover. That was really upsetting. Steven was the only one; he stood behind me the whole way. It was due to him that I got this made so quickly. Crippling? No. Devastating? Yes. At that point, I was reading a lot of Murakami's work. I found a lot of peace in it. You suffer bad fortune in life, but nobody got hurt. - Lodge Kerrigan

Keane represents a filmmaker's resilience and refusal to give up. It was made with a very small crew and shot in under 8 weeks. It also has elements of In God’s Hands in the plot (child abduction). So in a way something good came out of tragedy (although I can only imagine the performance of a lifetime that Saarasgard gave under the direction of someone like Lodge Kerrigan). But at the same time, Damien Lewis gave the performance of his career in Keane (and it's so underrated its criminal). In Keane, Lewis was reminiscent of other performances in previous Lodge Kerrigan films like Vincent D'onofrio in Claire Dolan and Peter Greene in Clean, Shaven along with Ralph Fiennes in Cronenberg's Spider. The scene in the bar alone should have got him an academy award nomination. All the moments where he's is trying his best to control his schizophrenic outbursts are just heartbreaking to watch. Lewis' performance is also another example of the understanding that Kerrigan has about mental illness and how it should be represented on film.



An "issue" I have outside of its similarity to Clean, Shaven is the logic behind one aspect of the story - In the film Keane lives in a motel and becomes friends with a struggling single mom and her daughter (Amy Ryan & Abigail Breslin) who live down the hall from him. One night he loans her money when he discovers she's about to be evicted. Then after briefly getting to know each other she suddenly trusts him enough to leave her daughter with him for a few days while she goes out of town to sort out personal business with her husband and family. Ok, Look...art house cinema has seen its share of questionable parenting on the big screen - the mother in Francois Ozon's See The Sea, the foster family returning their daughter to the orphanage in Haneke's 71 Fragments, the mother from Alice In The Cities, etc. I questioned what kind of mother would leave their daughter with someone who is technically a stranger but she's in a very desperate spot (her back story is slightly ambiguous as well) and is out of options. Again - I've never been in the position of a desperate parent like Ryan in Keane and I imagine things like this have definitely happened in real life. I also know this part of the story was to show Keane's fatherly side and to remind the audience that he is (or was) a father at one point in his life and knows what he's doing.
I don’t wanna come down on this movie too much because I still enjoy it very much. I just wonder what Kerrigan may have come up with had In God Hands not been ruined. Don’t let some of the things I’ve said in this write-up discourage you from seeing this because it really is a must-see (Keane is actually my initial recommendation to anyone looking to get into Kerrigan's work). But if you have the chance to check out his other films I’d do that first...