It’s all in the mind
The stars of what was meant to be Lodge Kerrigan’s third film, In God’s Hands, might have been happy enough with the shoot – Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard became a couple as result of working together – but the director wasn’t. The completed film was scrapped in 2002, owing to what Kerrigan describes as “technical issues with the negative”.
“It was pretty devastating,” says Kerrigan matter-of-factly in his rich baritone. Some others associated with the film absolved themselves of any responsibility, and Kerrigan retreated to reading the novels of Haruki Murakami. Fortunately, the insurance covered the disaster and in 2004 Kerrigan was able to return to the fray, shooting his new film, Keane, in 32 days for less than $1m.
Shot on location in the concrete outskirts and transport interzones of New York, Keane sticks as closely as possible to its mentally disturbed protagonist, who forges a bond with a little girl and her financially strapped mother while he searches desperately for his own missing daughter. The themes of mental illness and the loss of a child have cropped up before in Kerrigan’s work. His startling first feature, Clean, Shaven, also depicted a mentally ill man in search of his child. In God’s Hands also hinged on a child’s disappearance, but Kerrigan stresses Keane is not a sequel or a remake.
“It deals with similar themes, but it’s a completely new script; I started from scratch. In God’s Hands was about a man who was very religious, a fundamentalist Christian in a grassroots religious community, who loses his faith after his child is abducted.”
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Keane is the most rigorous portrait of a mentally ill character since David Cronenberg’s Spider; in both films, the protagonist picks through a warped and tattered memory to the point of virtually restaging the event that wiped out the ground beneath his feet. But, where the expressionist Spider penetrated its main character’s addled consciousness, Keane gets an objective handle on a flailing subjectivity. The titular character, William Keane, is almost always in the frame: the camera will latch on to his shoulder or reel around to follow his line of vision.
Damian Lewis, the 35-year-old British actor best known for starring in the TV series Band of Brothers, plays the title role. “When I read the script, I loved the compassion and unjudgmental attitude toward a person with mental illness,” Lewis says, “which runs in parallel with a completely natural, rational emotional trauma that he experiences over the abduction of his kid.” In writing the script, Kerrigan drew on his own experiences as a father. “I have a really willful 11-year-old daughter and, like every parent, there have been times when I’ve lost her in public, and your heart just drops,” says Kerrigan.
Lewis wasn’t bothered by the possibility that his role might be viewed as a replacement for In God’s Hands. “From an actor’s point of view, so many people take jobs that have been passed up by three or four people – it just wouldn’t make sense to have an egotistical problem with a part as brilliantly written as this because someone might have been offered it before you.”
Lewis prepared for his role in part by spending time at Manhattan’s Fountain House, a support facility for the mentally ill. “It’s a halfway house, or really a club, set up for people with mental illness who are no longer in institutions. You can talk to people there who are lucid and have remarkable stories to tell, and in the same room you’ll have someone in the corner rocking back and forth, experiencing unbelievably heightened anxiety.”
Kerrigan’s film internalises that heightened anxiety, resulting in a film that captivates for its tension and its empathy. As imagined in the script and in Lewis’s bracing performance, William is locked in ceaseless, hour-by-hour battles with his own seditious mind, whether he’s self-medicating with alcohol, cocaine and grimy bathroom-stall sex, or shopping in the children’s department in a gesture of hope or denial. The quasi-familial presence of little Kira (Abigail Breslin) and her mum (Amy Ryan) has a steadying effect – it’s agonisingly clear that William, for all his handicaps, would make an excellent father. But he’s often pulled down by the undertow of delusion and bottomless grief.
William is an instantly recognisable figure of the universal urban landscape, muttering to himself at the bus depot, shambling through traffic as he shouts into anonymous car windows. At the same time, though, his plight reveals the terrifyingly precarious balance of everyday existence. Who among us can claim that their mind would remain intact under assault from some unthinkable catastrophe? What parent can truly say they wouldn’t lose their grip on sanity if their child simply disappeared from their side – swallowed up by a train-platform crowd?
The taut verisimilitude of Keane can be partly attributed to its living, breathing New York locations. The vast Port Authority transportation hub, site of the abduction of William’s daughter, provides a major set, as he obsessively retraces his steps and approaches employees and commuters with his child’s picture (“Have you seen my daughter?”). And director of photography John Foster’s kinetic, up-close camerawork recalls the films of the Palme d’Or-winning Dardenne brothers, makers of this year’s L’Enfant.
“The Dardennes deal with people who struggle, who aren’t necessarily all good in a moral sense, who are flawed and commit questionable acts, but who are human and familiar,” Kerrigan says. “They have tremendous compassion for their characters, and for that I really admire them.”
The shoot presented unusual challenges, says Kerrigan. “Since we were shooting handheld, John [Foster] could not physically handle 1,000ft loads, so we were using 400ft loads, which is about four minutes of footage. And some of our takes are four minutes long, without cutting – they’re in there. There’s one take at the Port Authority that’s 399 feet. It was amazingly tense to shoot these powerful emotional moments in that live environment, but thrilling. Weirdly, it was really fun.”
“Fun” might not be exactly the word Lewis had in mind. “We couldn’t control background movements or people looking at the camera, so sometimes we would shoot an incredibly intense scene nine, 10 times before everything came together,” he says. “I could nail it two or three times, but then I’d start to dip, just as Abigail was hitting her stride. It starts to feel like keeping a car ticking over while you’re refuelling yourself. By take 10 you’re in bits and you just hope no one walks past and looks into the camera.
“It’s a knockout role for an actor in terms of achieving a credibility in a character who spends 90 minutes in an extreme emotional state,” Lewis continues. “It’s a huge responsibility. It’s not something you can dare to get wrong.”
Five films on the edge of sanity
Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963)
Before this, mental illness was played either for thrills, as with the Boris Karloff chiller Bedlam, or laughs, such as Arsenic and Old Lace. A journalist has himself admitted into a brutal mental institution in order to solve a murder. What seems like an ill-thought-out plan at the offset soon appears almost suicidal as he becomes trapped both physically and mentally by the harsh regime. It still surprises and stands as a prime example of Fuller’s style: you could read the film as a documentary-maker fighting a losing battle with his pulp sensibilities.
Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1964)
Polanski’s view of 1960s London differs from everyone else’s. Any swinging here is likely to be done on the end of a noose. Catherine Denueve’s fragile beautician is left on her own in an oppressive and hellish apartment building in Earl’s Court. Her isolation and weak grasp of English further shatter a mind assailed by paranoia and deep, sexually rooted distrust of any man she sees. Similar hallucinogenic themes crop up in Polanski’s later works The Tenant and Rosemary’s Baby, although in the latter, at least, the devil got the blame.
Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
The red-tape-bound world Gilliam and co-writer Tom Stoppard created was so oppressive that daydreams provided the only possible respite, however brief. But when such flights of fancy are an essential part of survival, you easily move into the world of the schizophrenic. This have-your-cake-and-eat-it approach to visualising mental instability has also been deftly employed in such fine films as A Matter of Life and Death and Gilliam’s own Twelve Monkeys. But Brazil remains perhaps the gutsiest of the bunch; it’s one of the few films where the lead character’s complete mental breakdown is seen as a happy ending.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Foreman, 1975)
You can view this classic pretty much any way you like. Microcosm of society, political allegory, whatever – but at its core it’s an intensely moving character-driven drama. The cast is incredibly strong and every character makes a lasting impression. The moments of humour are paid for by some harrowing scenes. Filming at a working institution in Oregon adds to the realism, and for once Jack Nicholson’s “mad” schtick makes him seem like the sanest one on the screen.
Girl, Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999)
Since its publication, Susanna Kaysen’s account of her long incarceration and treatment in a mental institution, starring Winona Ryder, has been a handbook for troubled teens. It’s not quite as successful as a movie: despite some spirited performances, the highly photogenic cast often push this towards the “lipstick lobotomy” genre. But despite such unevenness, the message that nearly anyone could be admitted to such a place on the flimsiest of pretexts rings disturbingly true.
Phelim O’Neill
· Keane opens at the Curzon Soho, London W1, on September 22. Box office: 0870 756 4620
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