It is a performances centric movie

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

and having seem the film, still waiting.Well it did keep me on the edge of my seat for quite a while. A long while. Damian Lewis is a brilliant actor, his face conveys so much of the inner turmoil of a man, flirting with insanity, who has lost his daughter in a moment of carelessness in a New York bus station.Or has he? One never knows for sure. Tiny innuendos are offered along the way, but never quite enough.There is no follow-through of any of the tantalizing story lines.I was left to ponder the carelessness of a woman who would leave her daughter alone with so troubled a man, and not for a few hours either but overnight.There is some sort of resolution at the end where Keane's grief finally breaks through. But grief for what? I had to work very heard for very little return.5/10.

Keane (2004)This is a one man show all the way, and young, slightly crazed father played by Damian Lewis gives it his intense best. Almost nothing happens for 100 minutes, nothing in the sense of plot development, so it really is up to Lewis to make his troubles come alive. His problem is that his daughter disappeared when he was with her in a bus station, and a year later he is still looking for her, trying to recreated the events that surrounded the mystery.But what strikes the viewer is maybe impatience, not with the narrative, but with the presentation of it. The movie ends up being a recreation of the tortured mind, the angst, the regrets, of this young father. And so the movie recreates that anxiety in the viewer. It seems impressive on some detached level, but it doesn't quiet work. The shaky camera, the constant striving and looking, the endless lack of progress, makes for unpleasant viewing. That doesn't mean it isn't interesting, but it isn't enjoyable. Oddly enough, many movies about terrible things manage to rise above their terribleness and the movie becomes moving, or enlightening, or simply aesthetic. "Keane" doesn't try to do any of those things.It would help if Lewis were able to create a more sympathetic type. You do want him to succeed, but you also don't want to really spend an hour and a half with him like this. When a second character, a young woman, arrives halfway through, it seems like a crack in the gloom, but then she doesn't become a major character. Her daughter, gradually, does, but only in a symbolic way--we never quite get to know or sympathize with the daughter directly.This is all more analysis than criticism, really. But it's a heads up for people looking for a certain kind of emotional drama. A movie like "Julie" has a filmic richness that takes an even worse situation about a child and makes it gripping. "Keane" remains in the mind and emotional troubles of its main character, and in Lewis's hands that's not really enough.

Naturalism is so effective because it gives us the urgency and reality of a documentary, but it captures what would be unfeasible between a real person and a camera but a few inches from his face. Lodge Kerrigan's Keane opens with a man scouring the Port Authority Bus Terminal, searching for his lost daughter. He has a newspaper clipping he shows to people, who hustle along, perceiving insanity. The girl has been missing for weeks or months. It's not clear-cut. This quest has been part of the day-to-day life of the titular man, who then departs into a coarse street grind: An entire bottle of beer at one swig, vodka, cocaine, hookers, careless sex.Keane, like Peter Winter, the central figure of Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven, is a schizophrenic in search of his daughter. But Winter has a daughter. Did Keane have a daughter, did she vanish, is she even real? There is a vast distinction between the two films, created by the insistence on Keane's longing to take up in the world. He admonishes himself about looking decent to go on his search. He goes shopping for clothes for the missing girl. His periods of disorientation and careless disregard fluctuate with periods when he is silent and attempts to soothe himself and concentrate. The constant exhilarating energy of the heart of New York City makes this difficult for a man in his condition.Keane is played by Damian Lewis. Here he embodies a border of delirium that Kerrigan grasps with a feral compassion. There is no cause for us to buy that Keane, or allegedly his daughter, would be more fortunate if he found her. The camera eyes him without remorse, and his performance compels us because he depicts not despondent insanity but his urge to break away from his malignancies. It is entirely possible he did have a daughter, and she was kidnapped. There is always that dreadful prospect, but the movie remains diffident because in Keane's state, confronting hard evidence would surely kill him, shock him back to life and kill him again. Nevertheless, his memories of the final moments before his daughter's vanishing seem too striking and lifelike to be anything but agonizingly real.In a fleabag boarding house, he comes across a woman named Lynn played by Amy Ryan and her 7-year-old daughter Kira, a younger Abigail Breslin. They're poverty-stricken. Her husband has left them, perhaps to find a job, possibly to get out. Keane collects disability checks, and gives Lynn money, which she lacks desperately enough to take, particularly because he is at a quiet, tender stage, and doesn't want anything for it, or at least not anything she might not be inclined to give. Lynn can't pick up Kira after school. Will Keane meet her, bring her home, and look after her for a few hours? He will. They go to McDonald's. They go ice-skating. This Keane might have made a nice dad. Which Keane is it? What will transpire? The tension evolves not out of the child's peril, if she is in any, as our immediate feelings tell us. But the more time that overdrawing has to erode, we find it comes out of Keane's despair about himself. He has been going through a peaceful phase. He is scared of the burden he has abruptly accepted. Does he somehow mistake Kira for his missing daughter?Kerrigan's films construct realms of individual engrossment. Characters on the brink pursue children they believe will endow them with much-needed contentment. The substance of Keane frees Kerrigan to burrow numerous formalistic capabilities with film that are scarcely seen in more mainstream cinema. And they are immensely effective. The film was shot with a hand-held camera with single takes lasting up to five minutes with no cutaways. It contains extensive periods of little to no dialogue and has no musical score except the sounds of place, of confusion, of buses roaring to and fro. We see mostly obscure, unfamiliar and remote city streets, marginalizing poor Keane. The film means to be a shakingly sensory experience, and is.

I watched this film because I adore Damien Lewis ((Band of Brothers.) I recorded it and was glad I did; it was so harrowing I kept having to stop the tape. Don't let that put you off; the acting, from Lewis and from the seven-year-old girl who is his co-star, is heartbreaking. I don't know whether anyone else has mentioned this, but there is no music in the film. This was a wise decision by the director. Music often tells the viewer what to think and how to feel; believe me, this is not necessary in this film. The lack of music heightens the tension and makes it more realistic. The ending isn't happy, as such, but Keane achieves a kind of closure and it is beautifully done, without being sentimental. Stunning acting is paired with stunning direction. A masterpiece.