***½/****
starring Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryan
written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan
by Bill Chambers It may seem as though Lodge Kerrigan is spinning his wheels by revisiting the territory of his directorial debut two pictures later, but this actually provides a means by which to judge Kerrigan's maturation as an auteur. Only slightly more prolific than Terrence Malick, Kerrigan quietly penetrated the indie scene with 1994's Clean, Shaven, which cast Peter Greene–in a role that brilliantly exploited the actor's own mercurial nature–as Peter Winter, a paranoid schizophrenic scoping out his only child and her new parents; the film furnishes us with a view of Peter's mental landscape through a crafty, Alan Splet-esque sound design but ultimately reverts to conventional cat-and-mouse tropes. Kerrigan's wondrous Keane is about a man, William Keane (a simply profound Damian Lewis), whose little girl was stolen out from under his nose at a train station the year before; Keane is recapitulating the events of that fateful day as the movie opens, wielding a newspaper clipping on the kidnapping as if it's a doctor's note rationalizing his manic behaviour. Like Clean, Shaven, Keane mines considerable suspense from the protagonist's fluctuating sanity, but John Foster's camera never leaves Lewis's side–most of the time, it's not more than ten inches from his face. Where Clean, Shaven introduced a cop to bias us against the main character (leading to a memorably guilty reversal of expectations), the sheer intimacy of Keane denies the viewer a scapegoat for any of our feelings towards the unstable but manifestly human Keane when he befriends a part-time waitress (Amy Ryan) and her holy grail of a young daughter (Abigail Breslin of Signs, holding her own). For some, Kerrigan's cinema of unclosed grief is an endurance test because watching a movie without an emotional superintendent is too great a responsibility. (Keane doesn't even have underscore.) What matters is empathy, though, and that's something Kerrigan obviously has for Keane in spades, or else he wouldn't be so patient with him. Programme: Special Presentations
