Reviewed - Keane: It's been a while since we've seen a satisfactory existentialist drama concerning a lone madman loose in the city. The wait is over.
Lodge Kerrigan, taking up themes explored in Taxi Driver, L'Étranger and any number of grim 1950s plays, here delivers a devastatingly gripping tale of alienation and despair. Keane, the agent for Kerrigan's bleak musings, is not a bellicose Corkonian footballer, but, rather, a father driven to madness by the disappearance of his young daughter (or, perhaps, a lunatic who mistakenly believes he once had such a child).
The director, working with a handheld camera on the streets of Manhattan, follows his jabbering, fretting subject as he pesters passers-by in bus stations and negotiates pathetically with the staff at his seedy flophouse. Keane looks and sounds as if he was once wealthy. That fact and the knowledge that he is moving through the few ungentrified streets on one of the planet's wealthiest locales neatly articulates the thinness of civilisation's veneer.
The closest thing we get to a plot point in this twitchy, agitated film occurs when the protagonist encounters a woman and her daughter at the boarding house. An anxious scene depicting an unappetising meal taken in the woman's room trades in the sort of discomfort that could, in the hands of a humorist, be exploited to less perturbing effect. Later, when Keane is left in charge of the child, events become more unsettling still. Will he reveal a psychotic side? Will history repeat itself?
Kerrigan, director of the interesting Claire Dolan, is to be congratulated for maintaining a tone of tense unease throughout. And Abigail Breslin, so good in the current Little Miss Sunshine, is astonishingly focused as the young girl. But the film, released two years ago in America, is most notable for its remarkable central performance. Damian Lewis, appearing in every scene, distributes neurotic concern to every synapse of his troubled body and never for a second allows actorly mannerisms to creep in. You would never guess he was (no joke) at Eton with David Cameron.
