..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

In his gripping psychological drama, Keane, Lodge Kerrigan takes a parent’s greatest nightmare, and, by making his audience an accomplice to what may be a crime in progress, ratchets up the fear factor to an almost unimaginable degree.

That said, however, Keane won’t find many friends among the freak-of-the-week crowd or the mopes who enjoy watching teenagers get hacked to death for the sin of necking in the local Lovers Lane. Kerrigan’s protagonist has the potential for becoming a monster, of sorts, but one who’s as deserving of our pity as Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, who couldn’t control his own worst impulses, either.

“I have a daughter, Serena, who’s now 11,” explains Kerrigan, who was born and raised in New York City. “When she was younger, I’d take her to the Rite-Aid across the street from our apartment , and she would scamper up and down the aisles. There were times when I couldn’t find Serena, and I would run around the store looking for her.

“You know how your heart drops into your stomach when a child just seems to disappear? That was the genesis of Keane.”

This all-too-commonplace situation has fueled dozens of episodes of CSI, Law & Order and TV dramas too numerous to mention. There are only three ways these things can end: happily, with the safe return of the child; badly, when a dead body is discovered by police; or ambiguously, with a photo of the child on a milk carton or on a flyer stapled to a telephone pole.

Keane dials up the tension in another way.

It creates a scenario in which the parent of that missing child was on shaky emotional ground, even before the disappearance, and, in the resulting turmoil, he crossed the border into schizophrenia. In the grip of unimaginable grief and paranoia, the parent has condemned himself to a life-sentence of obsessing over a daughter, who may be dead, in the control of a madman, living with another family, an invention of his imagination or free and safe, but under the protection of an unforgiving spouse.

“I thought, what if I were schizophrenic and my daughter actually did vanish?,” Kerrigan continued. “What if I didn’t have the support of my family, or another kind of safety net in which to fall? I think, in a very short time, my mental state would disintegrate and slip to rock bottom.”

Although we don’t learn much more about William Keane than that he truly believes he has a 6-year-old daughter, who disappeared at a Port Authority bus terminal, it’s clear that the absence of someone or something has melted key elements of his emotional circuitry. Throughout the 93-minute entirety of Keane, we wonder if the young man’s daughter actually existed, and, if she did, what happened to her and who was to blame.

Kerrigan allows us to imagine the best and the worst about Keane, in equal measure. That he could eventually turn out to be either a victim of circumstances or truly a monster puts a lot of pressure on viewers conditioned to being spoon-fed cues as to where they should invest their sympathies.

“Observing behavior is far more fascinating than accepting pat explanations for complex psychological motivations,” he suggests. “Life’s more complicated than that. Keane’s motivations are relatively clear, but they’re not laid out on a platter for viewers.

“In Keane’s mind, at least, his daughter was abducted. He plays the scenario of that day over and over in his mind, hoping the outcome will change … he simply can’t believe she’s gone.”

In New York, Kerrigan adds, “poverty and mental illness go hand and hand. He can’t hold a job for very long, and uses what money he gets to self-medicate himself with drugs and alcohol.”

Kerrigan’s debut film, Clean Shaven, also dealt with mental illness. It concerns a schizophrenic man, with some kind of an institutional past, who is desperately trying to get his daughter back from her adoptive family, but remains haunted by a discordant inner soundtrack.

That film, which was presented in Un Certain Regard at the 1994 Cannes Festival, was shown at more than 30 festivals and in art houses around the world. The writer-direct proudly notes that it’s been shown at several seminars and conferences for mental-health professionals.

To prepare for Keane, Kerrigan and his lead actor, Damian Lewis, spent time at New York’s Fountain House, a self-help program operated by men and women recovering from mental illness, in collaboration with professional staff. Lewis, whose performance is nothing short of spectacular, went to the “clubhouse” to study the behavior of its members.

“I have a friend who’s a longtime sufferer of schizophrenia, and have had conversations with many other people in his condition,” Kerrigan said. “I was struck by my inability to discern when they’re telling the truth or everything is made up. In ‘Keane,’ I want the audience to make up their own minds about what they’re seeing.”

Our sense of mystery and anxiety thicken even further after Keane is approached by a cash-strapped neighbor in his transient hotel, and is asked to baby-sit her 7-year-old daughter. It is the beginning of a relationship that could end in tragedy or redemption, but, again, we’re given few clues.

Kerrigan recruited Lewis after seeing him in Band of Brothers, in which the Londoner played Major Richard D. Winters.

“Usually, actors are cast in roles that are similar to those in which they made their first big impression,” said Kerrigan, who also tapped another Brit, the late Katrin Cartlidge, for the lead in Claire Dolan. “My process is more intuitive. Keane and Winters are night and day.

“I went to London to hang out with Damian for a few days, so I could tell if we saw the character in the same way, and if we both could work well together.”

Since Keane is an independently financed project -- distributed through Magnolia Pictures -- it should surprise no one if, later this fall, Lewis and Kerrigan are nominated for Spirit Awards. Cartlidge and her director received nods in 1999, as well, even though Claire Dolan had been seen only on the festival circuit. (In 1995, Clean, Shaven was nominated by the IFP West for Best First Feature.)

“All of the movies I made, Keane, Claire Dolan, Clean, Shaven (which starred Peter Greene), have been built around a central performance, and they all live and die by that performance,” said Kerrigan. “This one, perhaps more than the others, because Damian is in every shot. It was crucial for the actor playing Keane to convey the very real possibility that, at some point in his past, he was a father and a good one, at that.

“Damian isn’t a parent, and, yet, he was able to portray one so well. We didn’t have any discussions about it … he just understood.”

In the real world of Hollywood, his is exactly the kind of tour-de-force performance that academy voters will ignore come January, assuming, perhaps incorrectly, it will be accorded due respect by the Spirit voters. There aren’t enough fingers on one’s hands to count the fine actors -- including Joan Allen, for Off the Map -- who will be similarly disregarded, for the sin of appearing in films that won‘t be accorded nomination campaigns.

This go-round, at least, Kerrigan doesn’t have to worry about his picture being seen. It’s opening in New York Friday and in Los Angeles next week, and should find plenty of traction outside of limited release.

The same couldn’t be said for Claire Dolan, which concerned an Irish immigrant working as a prostitute to pay for her mother’s care in a New Jersey nursing home. Despite being nominated for awards at the 1998 edition of the Cannes festival, Stockholm and the Spirits, it didn’t see the light of day here until February, 2000, and then only on a couple of screens.

Considering the sterling performances by Cartlidge, Vincent D’Onofrio and Colm Meaney, such neglect bordered on the criminal.

“When Keane was shown at Toronto, last year, we had three companies interested in releasing it,” Kerrigan said. “I try to avoid commenting on the business end, but it’s nice to see new companies coming in to fill the void … companies that are more adept at dealing with provocative films.

“As the independent distributors of the ’90s grew into production companies and aligned with the major studios, they became more conservative … interested in profit potential. At the end of the day, it all comes down to creating an awareness for a film, which, in turn, is all about dollars and cents.”

Like everything else in Hollywood, t’was ever thus.

September 8 , 2005
- Gary Dretzka