Nothing to do with footballers Roy or Robbie (nor with the fey, chart-friendly Brit-popsters), this Keane is instead an edgy psychological character-study set in an overcrowded and bleakly impersonal modern-day Manhattan. Actually, there is a football 'connection' here of sorts: writer-director Kerrigan's follow-up to Clean Shaven, Claire Dolan (and the 'lost' In God's Hands) is, as sportscasters would say, very much 'a film of two halves': both of them significantly, perhaps even fatally, flawed. 

   After stark monochrome titles (like all that follows, austerely sans score), we're plunged straight into the 'action': ginger-haired, thirtysomething William Keane (Damian Lewis) - is in Manhattan's bustling Port Authority Bus Terminal. He questions passers-by and staff and looking for 'clues' in his desperate quest to find out what happened to his daughter Sophie - who he says was abducted here several months before (in September, of all months: at this point viewers may recall that the Port Authority also happened to own the World Trade Center).

   It soon becomes clear that Keane isn't quite "all there," although it's debatable whether his unhinged, erratic mental state is the result of extreme grief or psychiatric dysfunction - or perhaps a combination of the two. And is Keane's propensity to substance-abuse (alcohol and cocaine) a symptom or a cause of his distress? More crucially, did 'Sophie Keane' actually ever exist? This latter possibility makes Keane (co-produced by Steven Soderbergh) a low-budget cousin of Hollywood hits Flightplan and The Forgotten - although the downbeat mood of jagged unease is closer to Nicolas Winding Refn's comparatively little-seen John Turturro vehicle Fear X, which also used the disappearance of a loved-one as pretext for an exercise in nightmarish, implicitly post-9/11 paranoia.

   Keane is, however, rather more focussed than Refn's overambitious David Lynch-hommage: the up-close-and-personal, hand-held approach recalls Kyle Henry's recent Room which also tracked an obsessive 'searcher' around the unfriendly streets of Manhattan. If anything, the early stretches of Kerrigan's picture are rather too suffocatingly focussed: scene after scene spent in the protagonist's sweaty, tormented, antisocial company becomes distinctly wearing - likewise Lewis's admirably committed performance often strays over the invisible line that separates virtuouso work from indulgent, audition-piece mannerism.

   It's a great relief, then, when Kerrigan belatedly injects a bit of plot into what had seemed destined to be an increasingly tiresome, gimmicky one-man show. Keane befriends a strapped-for-cash neighbour (Amy Ryan) and her young daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin), the latter evidently reminding him of his own (phantom?) offspring. When Keane is asked to collect Kira from school, the pair quickly bond - a process which continues and deepens when circumstances mean he must look after her for a whole day.

   The Keane/Kira relationship is undeniably touching: it helps that Keane becomes much less jittery and volatile in the moppet's company, and that little Breslin (easily the most consistently impressive thing about the picture) turns in a quite exceptional performance of convincing, worrying vulnerability. 'Worrying,' because in the third act Kerrigan suggests that we're in for a horrific climax - that Keane's (mostly) unsympathetic behaviour, which we've already seen can be stunningly rude, beyond-the-pale selfish and scarily violent, might lead him into the abyss.

   This prospect gives proceedings a real atmosphere of tension, but by this stage we've had to swallow several key plot-points of increasingly dubious plausibility. A minor but telling moment is when Keane, who's otherwise been the very model of parental concern, sends the freshly-bathed Kira to bed without drying her hair. But this is very small beer alongside the various contrivances employed to bring Kira and Keane together, and then keep them in each other's company for such a protracted period. These strain and ultimately snap our suspension of disbelief, unfortunately torpedoing whatever it is Kerrigan hopes to achieve.

Neil Young
26th December, 2005

KEANE : [5/10] : USA 2004 : Lodge KERRIGAN : 104 mins (timed)
seen on DVD in Worcester (UK), 24th December 2005 - with thanks to Martin Wendel