Press Archive

Sunday Herald
24 September 2006
By Demetrios Matheou
Source

Keane

I believe Lodge Kerrigan to be one of the great unsung directors of American cinema. Like his earlier films Claire Dolan and Clean, Shaven, Keane demonstrates a rigorous intelligence, a deep compassion for society’s marginal figures, and a highly-developed sense of cinema’s ability to reflect mental states and emotional situations.

Here, the object of Kerrigan’s gaze is William Keane (Damien Lewis), a loner who haunts New York’s Port Authority bus station, in search of the daughter supposedly abducted some months before. But so fragile is the man’s mental health – he is paranoid, obsessive, self-destructive and possibly schizophrenic – that the girl’s existence is not absolutely certain. And if he’s making it up, what danger does he pose to the young mother and daughter who befriend him?

The film succeeds both as a drama that keeps us on the edge of our seats, and as a study of grief and psychological disorder. It is shot almost entirely in the famous bus terminal, the camera up close and personal and alive to the raw emotion (and the actual, everyday life) before it. It’s a tough film to watch, tense and worrying, not least because of Lewis’s remarkable performance as a decent, caring man barely holding himself together.