Tag: NY Port Authority Bus Terminal

A Taut Realism That Will Knock You For A Loop

by Staff | This Week in New York | August 19, 2022

KEANE (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)

Film at Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave & Broadway
Opens Friday, August 19, 2022
www.filmlinc.org
grasshopperfilm.com

Lodge Kerrigan’s remarkable third feature, Keane, is mesmerizing, always teetering on the brink of insanity. Damian Lewis, years before Homeland and Billions, stars as William Keane, whom we first meet as he rants and raves in the Port Authority, filled with anger, paranoia, and a twitchiness that immediately sets you on edge and never lets up. He is trying to figure out what went wrong when his daughter was abducted from the area, but he now acts like just another crazy at the bus depot. As he befriends a desperate woman (Gone Baby Gone’s Amy Ryan) and her daughter (Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin), you’ll feel a gamut of terrifying emotions rush through your body. The cast also features such familiar faces as Liza Colón-Zayas, Christopher Evan Welch, Chris Bauer, Frank Wood, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and others in tiny roles.

Continue reading This Week in New York: Keane, a 4K Restoration

Damian’s Instinctual Performance

by Charles Bramesco | The Playlist | August 19, 2022

While his unnerving 1993 debut, “Clean, Shaven,” really floored audiences who saw it back in the day, when director Lodge Kerrigan’s belated third film “Keane” first made the rounds on the festival circuit in the fall of 2004, it reintroduced the filmmaker to the forefront of a then-flourishing American independent cinema. In the nervy, visceral portrait of a paranoid father searching for his abducted daughter and finding a surrogate in a pre-fame Abigail Breslin, he proved how much can be done with a modest budget under one mil and a spirit of resourcefulness. Shooting in quivering handheld long takes around Port Authority, Kerrigan and his crew charted the grittiest fringes of New York by implanting themselves in real street-level milieus instead of approximating them with fakery. (Surely, the Safdie brothers and Ronald Bronstein picked up a couple of tricks for their simpatico Big Apple breakdowns “Daddy Longlegs” and “Frownland.”) At the time of the film’s theatrical release nearly one year later, he extolled the virtues of low-budget filmmaking as a necessary condition for an artist to make their kind of movie, their way.

But the years to come would steer Kerrigan away from the cinema and upend what he thought was his place in the industry. After completing one more feature (2010’s little-seen “Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs),” an often inscrutable metafiction in which Kerrigan himself plays “The Director”), he transitioned into TV work for the remainder of the decade. For-hire jobs on “Homeland,” “Bates Motel,” “The Americans,” and “The Killing” brought him as much fulfillment as he’d ever gotten from the movies, each guest-directing spot posing a unique hurdle to clear.

Continue reading ‘Keane’: Lodge Kerrigan Recalls His Striking 2004 & Second Breakthrough Thriller Starring Damian Lewis

Damian’s Magnetic Band of Brothers Role Leads to Keane

by Erik Luers | Film Maker Magazine | August 19, 2022

If every film is a document of its own making, then Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, shot in real locations in and around New York City in 2004, is also a depiction of the period in which it was made. Viewing the film on the occasion of a new digital restoration by Grasshopper Film that begins a theatrical run at Film at Lincoln Center today, I was struck by the numerous billboards and posters placed atop taxi cabs that the film’s lead character, William Keane (Damian Lewis), obliviously walks by. Short of pointing at the screen, Leonardo DiCaprio-style, as I noticed a poster for the upcoming season of The Sopranos or a cab ad advertising Bernadette Peters in Gypsy on Broadway, I appreciated the unintentional media ephemera that pops into the background of many of Kerrigan’s frames—such are the unexpected pleasures of filming in live locations!

When we first meet the title character, the unemployed, unstable redhead is wandering the Port Authority bus depot in an effort to retrace the steps he took when his daughter was abducted months prior at the complex’s basement level. When he’s not putting himself through this agonizing recreation of brutal trauma, Keane is living in a hotel and getting drunk, snorting cocaine, hooking up with various women in bathroom stalls,and purchasing children’s clothes for the eventual return of his kin. Something feels off: when Keane informs a character later in the film that he was married once but is now divorced, we begin to suspect that that might not be true and grow unsure as to whether there ever was an abducted daughter to begin with. When, back at the hotel, Keane encounters a down-on-her-luck mother (Amy Ryan) with a young daughter (Abigail Breslin), we fear that Keane may see something in the girl that reminds him of his. Sure enough…

Continue reading Always Maximize Your Shooting Time: Lodge Kerrigan on Keane

Masterfully Harrowing Psychodrama

by Isaac Feldberg | Roger Ebert.com | August 18, 2022

Across a body of work both compassionate and uncompromising, the filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan has maintained a distinctive physical proximity to the emotionally isolated characters he depicts living in society’s margins.

“Clean, Shaven,” his 1993 debut, worked rigorously to approximate the inner reality of a paranoid schizophrenic, conveying his visual and auditory hallucinations in all their abrasive force and abstraction. 1998’s “Claire Dolan,” meanwhile, applied a chillier, more disassociated kind of gaze to its study of an upscale New York sex worker, observing appointments through the windows of looming glass high-rises as if peering inside a fishbowl.

Continue reading Interview: You Can Never Be 100 Percent Sure – Lodge Kerrigan on Keane

Magnetism of Damian Lewis

by Ethan Vestby | The Film Stage | August 18, 2022

Often a re-release is granted to some long-cherished classic or cult sensation. In the case of Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, which played the festival circuit through 2004 and received a small theatrical run in 2005, a much-underseen film has been given another chance to find the audience it’s long deserved with a brand new 4K restoration courtesy Grasshopper Film.

The titular Keane (played impressively by Damian Lewis pre-Homeland and Billions) a mid-30s man suffering from schizophrenia and on a fruitless quest to find his lost daughter through the purgatory of New York City. Coming across Lynn (Amy Ryan) and her young daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin) living in precarity in the same motel, and soon finding himself taking care of the young girl while her mother tends to waiting tables. Keane begins to see her as potentially his lost daughter, which leads him down a dark path of recreating and revisiting his past.

Continue reading Interview: Lodge Kerrigan on Keane, the Magnetism of Damian Lewis, Steven Soderbergh’s Cut and the Economics of TV vs. Film

Mesmerized by the Performances

by Patrick Preziosi | Slant Magazine | August 15, 2022

As American indie cinema continues to make startlingly popular in-roads into extremely suffocating subjectivity—as evinced by the success of the Safdies’ Good Time and Uncut Gems, as well as the critical attention paid toward Eliza Hittman—it’s important to uphold the foundational impact of Lodge Kerrigan’s four films. The last decade and change has seen the director lending his talents to television, most notably The Girlfriend Experience, and, now, ahead of the release of the 4K restoration of his 2004 film Keane, it’s as good a time as any to reacquaint oneself with the singular potency of Kerrigan’s artistry.

Even after the visceral puzzlebox journey of 1993’s Clean, Shaven and the unnerving stateliness of 1998’s Claire Dolan, Keane still has a sideswiping power, which proved Kerrigan not to be some nominal provocateur, but a true disciple of some of the most penetrating of American directors of the back half of the 20th century, from Frederick Wiseman to John Cassavetes. As the eponymous William Keane, Damian Lewis ably registers both insurmountable grief and a more subtle mental imbalance: Perpetually searching for his missing daughter in and around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where she was abducted some months earlier, Keane is a man reasonably drowning in obsession and paranoia, compounding his personal, stalled-out investigation with drugs and alcohol.

Continue reading Interview: Lodge Kerrigan on Remastering Keane, Rehearsing on Location and More