Movie: Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)
Occasionally the voices in his head retreat, and when they do William Keane (Damian Lewis) can just about resemble a functioning adult. In one of these moments he meets Lynn (Amy Ryan) and her daughter, offering them 100 dollar to be able to stay in their New York hotel a couple more nights. She hesitantly accepts and invites him the next evening for some takeout in their room. An innocent dance follows and at the first hint of sexual potential she asks William to leave. He does without protest and with respectful consideration. In the next shot, it's the day after and we see a distressed William fussing about, hunched against a wall on a street corner. As the camera pans to the open space on the left it reveals a desparing Lynn in a phone booth, trying to reach her husband (Keane is the second film in a row here about a woman's unsuccesfull efforts to settle down in Albany with a man who may not be right for her) or at least find out whether he even is at the location she is calling. The scene evokes the painfully misjudged phone call from Taxi Driver for good reason. Both films are about a man in mental torment walking the streets of New York in the mistaken belief a woman will fall in love with him if he saves her from a situation she doesn't want to be rescued from. and both Scorsese and Kerrigan are compassionate in their understanding that their protagonists are still lucid enough to sense that human connection might offer a way out of their misery, but too far gone to have the capacity for it.
Kerrigan's approach is however different to Scorsese's. Taxi Driver plays out as an expression of Travis' inner life, every scene feeling on the verge of boiling out, as if possessed by De Niro's volatile, vulnerable mania. Keane is an intense film where the camera almost constantly stays extremely close to William, seeing every detail of his anguish as he contorts himself around New York. Even so, it allows more distance between the audience and Keane than Taxi Driver, remaining at all times a naturalistic third-person account of a mentally unwell person. We first meet William at a major transit station in New York where he walks around in a daze trying to retrieve his daughter who apparently disappeared some time ago. The film's ending impliees that something like that really did happen, but Kerrigan leaves it relatively open for interepreation and his decision late in the film to show Keane look for jobs during one of his more rational episodes potentially flips the narrative even further on its head. The implication that only now we are finally watching Keane do what he actually came to New York for fully conveys how much his mind sidetracks him from acting on his correct intentions.
I am a fan of slightly surreal accounts of a night that gets progressively more irrational, and of urban odysseys with a sense of the absurd. Combine the two and you can barely ever go wrong, which is why After Hours remains Scorsese's greatest movie. The best of these films wouldn't work without its collection of strange characters that pester, confound or annoy the main protagonists in their attempts to stabilise their situation. Often there is an implication that these side characters suffer from a social or psychological ill, but even when they are not used for comic effect/building atmosphere they are quckly tossed aside and forgotten after they've served their purpose for the film. Keane is consciously presented here as one of those people society would prefer to ignore, and often does. Kerrigan frames him constantly around passengers in transit, cars, busess and trains, all passing him by, paying no heed to his agony unless he gets into their face. He builds a lot of sympathy for him in the process, and ends the film at exactly the right point, allowing us to leave Keane on a positive note, despite knowing full well that what follows is gonna hurt even more than what came before. But we don't need to see that.
No comments:
Post a Comment