Iona Firouzabadi
posted 13 September 2006

Dominated by Damien Lewis's performance, Keane tells a fragment of a life, both vulnerable and violent. Taking an unobtrusive cyclical form, it is framed around returns to Manhattan's Port Authority Bus Terminal, an industrial emblem of urban transience. It is six months since Keane's six-year-old daughter Sophie was purportedly abducted within its walls. In returning to the terminal, searching for her and reliving the moments leading up to her disappearance, he seeks somehow to undo the past and thereby shed his present hell.

Beyond the psychological story of William Keane, the film's wider theme is transitory life on the outskirts of a city too big to notice. Living in the kind of motel that houses itinerant workers and homeless families, Keane befriends his temporary neighbours, a mother and daughter, Lynn Bedik (Amy Ryan) and Kira (Abigail Breslin). The relationship he builds with them is beautifully and subtly realised. The simple rituals and courtesies of daily existence that the three of them enact, profoundly express how those who have been spun to the edges of society hold on to their humanity. This is a film with no majestic shots of New York, no skyscrapers or other icons; this is a city in down and dirty close-up. The bigger picture is not relevant to these characters, just as they are not relevant to it. This is a film that feed off the stringencies of low-budget, independent filmmaking - a small cast, limited locations etc.

We first meet Keane abruptly via a stark jump cut - one of several serving to create a sense of dissonance. It takes us suddenly from the faceless concrete exterior of the bus terminal to a tight shot of Keane, at a ticket office window. Throughout the film the camera remains persistently close to him. There is very little traditional coverage in this film - very few wide or long shots across its 98 minutes. Its literal lack of cinematic scope, combined with long takes, no score, and a handheld camera style, constructs the aesthetic of an observational documentary. While the closeness is important, the distance is also significant. There is never an extreme close up and Keane's eyes never meet the eye of the camera. We are close, but not that close - a separation is maintained - the sense that there is glass between him and us.

What the film reveals is the fragile fundament of a man's reality. At first you believe that his daughter has been abducted, but as the erratic nature of his thought and behaviour become apparent, certainty is stripped away. Part of the perfection of this film is that certainty is never reconstructed with an easy narrative twist, trite explication or convenient flashback.