Can't help myself

Keane

(2004)

I'd been avoiding watching this for so long that it actually would have qualified as a Friday night deaccession, but I chose it tonight because I was running late and needed something short. And while it was as intense and hard to watch as I was expecting, it offered a little more potential for redemption and a lot more sweetness than I'd anticipated.

William Keane (Damian Lewis) haunts Penn Station looking for his daughter, a task made impossible by (1) its having been 2 years since she disappeared there and (2) his being completely unhinged. There seems little question that (1) is not cause of (2), though whether the reverse is true is unclear. In fact, (2) is so emphatic that for a long time I wondered whether (3) there was no lost daughter in the first place.

I'm pretty sure I don't believe that in the end, given the relationship that develops between Keane and a motel neighbor and her small daughter, played by two favorite actors I had no idea were in the thing, Amy Ryan and Abigail Breslin. (Keane also has a coke-and-sex interlude with a clubber played by Tina Holmes, whom I remember fondly as Maggie in Six Feet Under.) Thence the sweetness, thence the unsure staggering steps toward redemption, maybe. Glad I finally watched it.