Keane (film)
Encyclopedia
Keane is a 2004
American
drama film
written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan
. Set in New York City
, it focuses on a mentally disturbed man trying to come to terms with the abduction of his daughter several months earlier and the relationship he develops with a young girl and her mother.
The film premiered at the 2004 Telluride Film Festival
and was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival
, the New York Film Festival
, the 2005 Cannes Film Festival
, and the Deauville Film Festival, where it won both the Critics Award and the Jury Special Prize, before it went into limited theatrical release in New York City on September 9, 2005.
, from which she was abducted several months earlier, William Keane confronts ticket agents and random passersby with a newspaper account of her disappearance, but no one recalls seeing the little girl. After spending the night wandering the streets and sleeping along the side of the highway, he returns to the cheap hotel where he is living and finds he is unable to get into his room. The desk clerk tells him his payment is in arrears, and Keane covers the cost of another week's stay with a disability check.
Alone in his hotel room, Keane drinks beer and talks to himself about his ex-wife and the birth of their daughter, and he reads the clippings about another abducted New Jersey
girl who was found and reunited with her parents he keeps in an envelope. He makes contact with a drug dealer and purchases cocaine
, and the more he ingests the more paranoid he becomes, certain he is being followed and watched. He goes to a nightclub and snorts coke with a woman named Michelle, then has sex in a toilet cubicle with her.
Back at his motel, Keane meets Lynn Bedik and her daughter Kira, who is close in age to his missing child. Lynn clearly is having financial difficulties, and he insists she take the $100 he offers her. She asks Keane to watch Kira for a few hours, then calls the motel and leaves a message she will not be returning that night as planned. Keane reassures a despondent Kira, who fears Lynn has abandoned her, that her mother loves her and will be back.
The following day, Keane takes Kira to a local indoor skating rink and teaches her how to ice skate. While they are playing skee ball
in the adjacent arcade, Keane believes he is being watched by another patron and becomes agitated. Kira manages to calm him and they return to the motel. When Lynn arrives later, she explains she was with Kira's father Eric, who has arranged for them to move to Albany
, where he has found a job.
Desperate not to lose Kira because she reminds him so much of Sophia, Keane goes to her school, takes her without permission, and brings her with him to the Port Authority, allegedly to meet her mother there and board a bus to Albany. There he sends her to buy candies, as his daughter had done several months earlier, just minutes before she was abducted. It seems as if Keane is reviving the tragic loss of his daughter, perhaps expecting the abductor to show up again and try this time to abduct Kira to -as he was expecting him to show up every time he was visiting the station for all those months, imagining his plan and his schedule. This doesn't happen. He cries for his losses and decides to really get her to her mother. Kira tells him she loves him and he says he loves her too.
and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal
and Peter Sarsgaard
, which centered on the disintegration of a family after a child had been abducted. The film never was released due to "irreversible negative damage." With nothing left of his film to salvage, Kerrigan began researching and writing a new project that became Keane.
Kerrigan knew the location of the film would be a key plot element, and he wrote much of the script while walking around New York City, trying to get a feel for the main character and their surroundings. "It was exhilarating, working with that kind of energy. I also wrote a lot of the film there as well. I would go and play out a scene and try to act it out... to some degree try to find the emotions, by recreating, beat by beat, his mindset, the abduction of his daughter. It all goes back to location... when you are working in the actual area, you can answer all of the questions that would arise with much more immediacy."
The film was shot with a handheld camera with single takes lasting up to four minutes with no cutaways. It contains long periods of little or no dialogue and has no musical score. Shooting was completed within 32 days, and many of the Manhattan
and North Bergen, New Jersey
locations Kerrigan selected were remote, unfamiliar streets and backdrops used to help emphasise the downward spiral of the central character. "Poverty is part of it... people who suffer from mental illness are marginalized...and that place, the surrounding area, with all the confusion, the buses and people coming in and out...it is really an appropriate location."
Todd McCarthy of Variety
observed, "Watching Lewis so thoroughly inhabit the demented Keane, one can only wonder how an actor can live with such a character for weeks and weeks and maintain a semblance of sanity and contact with real life. [He] amazingly manages to find nuances of character while running his engine above the emotional red line throughout. It's a resonant, haunting performance."
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times
stated, "In a wholly unexpected and ultimately gratifying experience from writer-director Lodge Kerrigan, Keane is emotionally involving right from the beginning through its final frame . . . Aided by a most resourceful and empathetic cinematographer, John Foster, Kerrigan . . . seems to be trusting an intuition that never fails him. His focus naturally is primarily on Keane, yet he captures the relentlessly drab and impersonal urban landscapes in a way that reinforces the terrible isolation of William's anguished odyssey. As a rigorous filmmaker, Kerrigan eschews conventional exposition, which raises the possibility that William may be sufficiently deranged to have imagined his daughter's presumed abduction, perhaps even the child's existence. Tantalizing as this may sound, Kerrigan doesn't seem to be the kind of filmmaker who's playing with a tricky ambiguity, and Keane's recollections of the last moments leading up to his daughter's disappearance seem too vivid to be anything but excruciatingly real."
John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle
called the film "taut and suspenseful" and said, "Damian Lewis delivers a convincing, powerful and highly nuanced performance . . . He lets the audience feel compassion for Keane, and he does so without a hint of sentimentality. Easier said than done."
Peter Travers
of Rolling Stone
rated the film three out of four stars and commented, "Kerrigan is without peer at plumbing the violence of the mind. Keane means to shake us, and does."
Meghan Keane of the New York Sun
stated, "Some uncertainties - like whether his daughter was abducted, or even existed - are provoking, but most annoy. Keane's mental instability seems to wax and wane as is convenient for the narrative. He seems crazy when it makes for a compellingly awkward scene, and mentally competent when he wants something - like companionship or anonymous sex . . . By the end, the complete discomfort that Mr. Kerrigan has created seems like a forced experiment - one that may have been a rewarding challenge to create, but is difficult to watch, closer to asphyxiation than entertainment."
but lost to Robert Elswit
for Good Night, and Good Luck.
Gotham Award
nominations went to Lodge Kerrigan for Best Film and Damian Lewis for the Breakthrough Award.
format with an English audio track and Spanish subtitles.
The DVD includes an alternate version of the film edited by executive producer Steven Soderbergh. Fifteen minutes shorter than the original, it is preceded by a message from Soderbergh that reads, "While I was away on location, Lodge sent me a copy of Keane to look at before he locked picture. I loved the film and told him so, but I also sent him this version to look at, in case it jogged anything (it didn't). In any case, we agreed it was an interesting (to us) example of how editing affects intent. Or something."
2004 in film
The year 2004 in film involved some significant events. Major releases of sequels took place. It included blockbuster films like Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Passion of the Christ, Meet the Fockers, Blade: Trinity, Spider-Man 2, Alien vs. Predator, Kill Bill Vol...
American
Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...
drama film
Drama film
A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...
written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan
Lodge Kerrigan
Lodge Kerrigan is an American motion picture screenwriter and director. His 2010 film Rebecca H. entered into the Un Certain Regard section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.-Filmography:* Clean, Shaven...
. Set in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, it focuses on a mentally disturbed man trying to come to terms with the abduction of his daughter several months earlier and the relationship he develops with a young girl and her mother.
The film premiered at the 2004 Telluride Film Festival
Telluride Film Festival
The Telluride Film Festival was started in 1974 by Bill and Stella Pence, Tom Luddy and Jim Card in the town of Telluride, Colorado, United States. It is operated by the National Film Preserve....
and was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival is a publicly-attended film festival held each September in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2010, 339 films from 59 countries were screened at 32 screens in downtown Toronto venues...
, the New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
, the 2005 Cannes Film Festival
2005 Cannes Film Festival
The 2005 Cannes Film Festival started on May 11 and ran until May 22. Twenty movies from 13 countries were selected to compete. The awards were announced on May 21...
, and the Deauville Film Festival, where it won both the Critics Award and the Jury Special Prize, before it went into limited theatrical release in New York City on September 9, 2005.
Plot
Searching for his missing daughter Sophia in the Port Authority Bus TerminalPort Authority Bus Terminal
The Port Authority Bus Terminal is the main gateway for interstate buses into Manhattan in New York City...
, from which she was abducted several months earlier, William Keane confronts ticket agents and random passersby with a newspaper account of her disappearance, but no one recalls seeing the little girl. After spending the night wandering the streets and sleeping along the side of the highway, he returns to the cheap hotel where he is living and finds he is unable to get into his room. The desk clerk tells him his payment is in arrears, and Keane covers the cost of another week's stay with a disability check.
Alone in his hotel room, Keane drinks beer and talks to himself about his ex-wife and the birth of their daughter, and he reads the clippings about another abducted New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
girl who was found and reunited with her parents he keeps in an envelope. He makes contact with a drug dealer and purchases cocaine
Cocaine
Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...
, and the more he ingests the more paranoid he becomes, certain he is being followed and watched. He goes to a nightclub and snorts coke with a woman named Michelle, then has sex in a toilet cubicle with her.
Back at his motel, Keane meets Lynn Bedik and her daughter Kira, who is close in age to his missing child. Lynn clearly is having financial difficulties, and he insists she take the $100 he offers her. She asks Keane to watch Kira for a few hours, then calls the motel and leaves a message she will not be returning that night as planned. Keane reassures a despondent Kira, who fears Lynn has abandoned her, that her mother loves her and will be back.
The following day, Keane takes Kira to a local indoor skating rink and teaches her how to ice skate. While they are playing skee ball
Skee ball
Skee ball is a common arcade game and one of the first redemption games. It is similar to bowling except it is played on an inclined lane and the player aims to get the ball to fall into a hole rather than knock down pins...
in the adjacent arcade, Keane believes he is being watched by another patron and becomes agitated. Kira manages to calm him and they return to the motel. When Lynn arrives later, she explains she was with Kira's father Eric, who has arranged for them to move to Albany
Albany, New York
Albany is the capital city of the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Albany County, and the central city of New York's Capital District. Roughly north of New York City, Albany sits on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River...
, where he has found a job.
Desperate not to lose Kira because she reminds him so much of Sophia, Keane goes to her school, takes her without permission, and brings her with him to the Port Authority, allegedly to meet her mother there and board a bus to Albany. There he sends her to buy candies, as his daughter had done several months earlier, just minutes before she was abducted. It seems as if Keane is reviving the tragic loss of his daughter, perhaps expecting the abductor to show up again and try this time to abduct Kira to -as he was expecting him to show up every time he was visiting the station for all those months, imagining his plan and his schedule. This doesn't happen. He cries for his losses and decides to really get her to her mother. Kira tells him she loves him and he says he loves her too.
Production
A film about child abduction was prompted by Lodge Kerrigan's fear of his own daughter disappearing during a shopping excursion. "I realized, how in just four minutes, four minutes! your child could be abducted. Your life could be changed forever and there would be no way to recover from it. I knew that kind of visceral feeling would be a good starting point." The result was In God's Hands, produced by Steven SoderberghSteven Soderbergh
Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing commercial Hollywood films like Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the remake of Ocean's Eleven, but he has also directed smaller less...
and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Margaret Ruth "Maggie" Gyllenhaal born November 16, 1977) is an American actress. She is the daughter of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and the older sister of actor Jake Gyllenhaal. She made her screen debut when she began to appear in her father's films...
and Peter Sarsgaard
Peter Sarsgaard
John Peter Sarsgaard is an American film and stage actor. He landed his first feature role in the movie Dead Man Walking in 1995. He then appeared in the 1998 independent films Another Day in Paradise and Desert Blue. That same year, Sarsgaard received a substantial role in The Man in the Iron...
, which centered on the disintegration of a family after a child had been abducted. The film never was released due to "irreversible negative damage." With nothing left of his film to salvage, Kerrigan began researching and writing a new project that became Keane.
Kerrigan knew the location of the film would be a key plot element, and he wrote much of the script while walking around New York City, trying to get a feel for the main character and their surroundings. "It was exhilarating, working with that kind of energy. I also wrote a lot of the film there as well. I would go and play out a scene and try to act it out... to some degree try to find the emotions, by recreating, beat by beat, his mindset, the abduction of his daughter. It all goes back to location... when you are working in the actual area, you can answer all of the questions that would arise with much more immediacy."
The film was shot with a handheld camera with single takes lasting up to four minutes with no cutaways. It contains long periods of little or no dialogue and has no musical score. Shooting was completed within 32 days, and many of the Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
and North Bergen, New Jersey
North Bergen, New Jersey
North Bergen is a township in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2010 Census, the township had a total population of 60,773. Originally founded in 1843, the town was much diminished in territory by a series of secessions. Situated on the Hudson Palisades, it is one...
locations Kerrigan selected were remote, unfamiliar streets and backdrops used to help emphasise the downward spiral of the central character. "Poverty is part of it... people who suffer from mental illness are marginalized...and that place, the surrounding area, with all the confusion, the buses and people coming in and out...it is really an appropriate location."
Cast
- Damian LewisDamian LewisLewis was born in St John's Wood, London, the son of Charlotte Mary and J. Watcyn Lewis, a City broker. His paternal grandparents were Welsh. His maternal grandfather was Lord Mayor of London Ian Frank Bowater and his maternal grandmother's ancestors include Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of...
– William Keane - Abigail BreslinAbigail BreslinAbigail Kathleen Breslin is an American teen actress. She is one of the youngest actresses ever to be nominated for an Academy Award....
– Kira Bedik - Amy RyanAmy RyanAmy Ryan is an American actress. She has been nominated for an Academy Award and Golden Globe for her performance in Gone Baby Gone and is also known for her roles in the HBO series The Wire, playing Port Authority Officer Beadie Russell; In Treatment, playing psychiatrist Adele Brousse; and The...
– Lynn Bedik - Christopher Evan Welch – Motel Clerk
- Tina HolmesTina HolmesTina Holmes is an American television and film actress.- Early years and education :Holmes grew up in New York City and Connecticut. An Ivy Leaguer, she attended Yale University for two years followed by a move to Paris, France studying French Literature at the Sorbonne...
– Michelle - Liza Colón-ZayasLiza Colón-ZayasLiza Colón-Zayas is an American actress and playwright.She was born and raised in the The Bronx borough of New York City, and began her career starring in Off-Broadway productions...
– Ticket Agent - Chris BauerChris BauerMark Christopher "Chris" Bauer is an American film and television actor.-Early life:Bauer was born in Los Angeles, California and attended high school at Miramonte High School in Orinda, California. He played on Miramonte Championship football team his senior year, 1984...
– Bartender
Critical reception
Keane has received 83% fresh ratings on the film review website rottentomatoes based on 59 reviews.Todd McCarthy of Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
observed, "Watching Lewis so thoroughly inhabit the demented Keane, one can only wonder how an actor can live with such a character for weeks and weeks and maintain a semblance of sanity and contact with real life. [He] amazingly manages to find nuances of character while running his engine above the emotional red line throughout. It's a resonant, haunting performance."
Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
stated, "In a wholly unexpected and ultimately gratifying experience from writer-director Lodge Kerrigan, Keane is emotionally involving right from the beginning through its final frame . . . Aided by a most resourceful and empathetic cinematographer, John Foster, Kerrigan . . . seems to be trusting an intuition that never fails him. His focus naturally is primarily on Keane, yet he captures the relentlessly drab and impersonal urban landscapes in a way that reinforces the terrible isolation of William's anguished odyssey. As a rigorous filmmaker, Kerrigan eschews conventional exposition, which raises the possibility that William may be sufficiently deranged to have imagined his daughter's presumed abduction, perhaps even the child's existence. Tantalizing as this may sound, Kerrigan doesn't seem to be the kind of filmmaker who's playing with a tricky ambiguity, and Keane's recollections of the last moments leading up to his daughter's disappearance seem too vivid to be anything but excruciatingly real."
John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
called the film "taut and suspenseful" and said, "Damian Lewis delivers a convincing, powerful and highly nuanced performance . . . He lets the audience feel compassion for Keane, and he does so without a hint of sentimentality. Easier said than done."
Peter Travers
Peter Travers
Peter Travers is an American film critic, who has written for, in turn, People and Rolling Stone. Travers also hosts a celebrity interview show called Popcorn on ABC News Now and ABCNews.com.-Career:...
of Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
rated the film three out of four stars and commented, "Kerrigan is without peer at plumbing the violence of the mind. Keane means to shake us, and does."
Meghan Keane of the New York Sun
New York Sun
The New York Sun was a weekday daily newspaper published in New York City from 2002 to 2008. When it debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of an otherwise unrelated earlier New York paper, The Sun , it became the first general-interest broadsheet newspaper to be started...
stated, "Some uncertainties - like whether his daughter was abducted, or even existed - are provoking, but most annoy. Keane's mental instability seems to wax and wane as is convenient for the narrative. He seems crazy when it makes for a compellingly awkward scene, and mentally competent when he wants something - like companionship or anonymous sex . . . By the end, the complete discomfort that Mr. Kerrigan has created seems like a forced experiment - one that may have been a rewarding challenge to create, but is difficult to watch, closer to asphyxiation than entertainment."
Awards and nominations
John Foster was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best CinematographyIndependent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography
The Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography is one of the annual awards given by Film Independent, a non-profit organization dedicated to independent film and independent filmmakers.- 1980s :* 1986: Toyomichi Kurita – Trouble in Mind...
but lost to Robert Elswit
Robert Elswit
Robert Christopher Elswit, ASC is an American cinematographer. He has had multiple Oscar, BAFTA, and Independent Spirit nominations for several films, including There Will Be Blood. Elswit frequently works with director Paul Thomas Anderson.Elswit is a fierce defender of shooting with film, and...
for Good Night, and Good Luck.
Gotham Award
Gotham Awards
The Gotham Awards is an annual ceremony of awards presented to the makers of independent films which takes place in New York City...
nominations went to Lodge Kerrigan for Best Film and Damian Lewis for the Breakthrough Award.
DVD release
The film was released on Region 1 DVD on March 21, 2006. It is in anamorphic widescreenAnamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen, when applied to DVD manufacture, is a video process that horizontally squeezes a widescreen image so that it can be stored in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVD image frame. Compatible playback equipment can then re-expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen...
format with an English audio track and Spanish subtitles.
The DVD includes an alternate version of the film edited by executive producer Steven Soderbergh. Fifteen minutes shorter than the original, it is preceded by a message from Soderbergh that reads, "While I was away on location, Lodge sent me a copy of Keane to look at before he locked picture. I loved the film and told him so, but I also sent him this version to look at, in case it jogged anything (it didn't). In any case, we agreed it was an interesting (to us) example of how editing affects intent. Or something."