Shattered Innocence

KEANE

Directed by Lodge H. Kerrigan

A SOUND OF THUNDER

Directed by Peter Hyams

Is he or isn't he? Will he or won't he? These two questions animate Keane, writer-director Lodge H. Kerrigan's drama about an emotionally shattered loner who shambles along society's outer edges. The first question refers to the likelihood that the title character is insane, the second to the chance that Keane will cause harm to himself or someone else; as the movie unreels, we come to embrace both possibilities. But while the film generates considerable (if muted) suspense, it refuses to answer either question. Kerrigan prefers observation to momentum, and favors little behavioral details over sweeping statements; these preferences are the source of Keane's weaknesses as well as its strengths.

William Keane (gamely portrayed by "Band of Brothers" costar Damian Lewis) is a shattered innocent, a fundamentally decent man whose life seems to have been upended by trauma. He lives in a scuzzy motor lodge on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel. Every afternoon he goes to the Port Authority and relives what seems to be the trauma that shattered his life: the moment when his young daughter was lost (or possibly abducted). But despite Kerrigan's rigorously realistic style-the film is shot mostly in very long takes with a handheld camera that stays close to the hero-we can't be sure if the disappearance/abduction happened exactly as Keane remembers it, or if, in fact, he is "remembering" a real event at all.

When Keane befriends a poor single mom, Lynn Bedik (Amy Ryan), and grows close to her daughter, Kira (Abigail Breslin of Signs), our emotions whipsaw ever more acutely between empathy and doubt. In getting close to these two-even gaining their trust-Keane becomes more calm, attentive and gentlemanly, and in some ways nearly heroic. (Entrusted to care for Kira while Lynn makes a day trip, Keane reveals himself a kind, patient, attentive father figure, capable of talking to very young kids without condescension.) But we fear Keane's motives are darker than they seem-that perhaps he himself is responsible for whatever misery befell his family, and that history will repeat itself.

Kerrigan makes us wonder if Keane's past trauma caused (or exacerbated) his insanity, or if he's imagining a pivotal trauma to lend a false sense of structure to his shabby, disorganized life. (He has a small income but no steady job, and he drinks, does drugs and has anonymous, unprotected sex.) The filmmaker enforces uncertainty by literally restricting our field of vision; Kerrigan and cinematographer John Foster shoot most of Keane in long, unbroken, handheld takes, putting the camera inches from Keane's face or the side of his head and using a mostly shallow plane of focus. It's as if we're a bird sitting on Keane's shoulder as he wanders the city.

It's inaccurate to describe this strategy as first person, because if it were first person, we would never see Keane unless he looked into a mirror or other reflective surface. (See Ross McElwee's confessional documentaries for an example.) Kerrigan's approach is more like an extraordinarily intimate version of third person limited. It stays outside Keane's consciousness (no flashbacks or visions) while denying us access to information Keane could not personally see or hear. (That said, Kerrigan cheats a little bit when he needs to; in a scene where Keane hides in a doorway and eavesdrops on Lynn having an important phone conversation halfway down the block, I wasn't convinced he'd really be able to hear her that clearly.)

In interviews, Kerrigan has cited a number of stylistic inspirations and precedents, including the dirty realist school of documentary-style drama (John Cassavetes, Ken Loach, Alan Clarke) and films like The Conversation, which blurred the line between thriller and character portrait. Besides Bad Lieutenant-a film Keane visually and tonally resembles in some ways-the best comparison point is Kerrigan's 1993 debut Clean, Shaven, a highly subjective and unsettling look at a schizophrenic searching for his daughter. The latter's soundscape was as unnervingly hyper-real as Keane's photography is realistically constrictive.

But despite the shift of emphasis from sound to picture, the two films' achievements and pitfalls are remarkably similar. In the plus column, you rarely see American indies as spare and purposeful as Clean, Shaven and Keane. Kerrigan's choices unsettle partly because some part of you expects him to tire sooner or later and give us another vantage point-a traditional first person point-of-view shot, for instance, or a God's-eye-view of Keane at the Port Authority that makes Keane's obsessive mutterings seem comical rather than urgent.

Ultimately, though, Kerrigan's style, which presumably was intended as detached and nonjudgmental, eventually comes to seem clinical and blah. The lack of visual variety calls undue attention to the rare instances when Lewis overacts a bit, particularly a scene in a bar where he sings along with a certain song on the jukebox and demands that the bartender crank the volume. It's too much of an Oscar moment, as is the bit where Keane cajoles Lynn into slow dancing with him in her motel room. These moments and others make you feel as if you're watching a spiritually-dead-man-comes-back-to-life movie (a Hollywood staple, sometimes well-done) gussied up with the ascetic rigor of kitchen sink indie traditions. One of the reasons Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange and Bad Lieutenant are richer movies is the esthetic tension created by marrying subjective and objective techniques in the same movie, sometimes in the same shot. Kerrigan's style might be more focused, but it's also less rich and expressive.

Keane is more intriguing than satisfying, but at least it doesn't make you feel as though you wasted 106 minutes of your life. That's how I felt after sitting through A Sound of Thunder, a version of Ray Bradbury's classic 1953 short story that was shelved for two years, and with good reason: it's dumb, flabby, obvious, badly acted and chock full of special effects that would have been considered substandard 20 years ago.

Bradbury's story was so concentrated and abstract that it was practically a parable, and its signature image, a butterfly smashed by a heavy boot, was corny but radically tender, temperamentally closer to the romantic laments of Thomas Wolfe than to most sci-fi being written at the time. The over-scaled, under-imagined big-screen version-directed by Peter Hyams (Outland, 2010), who specializes in big, junky, dramatically unsatisfying spectacles-casts Ben Kingsley as the vainglorious owner of a time travel company that sends rich businessmen from 2050 back to the Cretaceous period, where they're allowed to shoot an allosaur that was going to die anyway, but forbidden to step off their elevated walkway for fear of altering the future. Ed Burns, whose somnambulist screen presence makes Paul Walker seem like Gary Oldman, plays the hero, a hotshot scientist (no joke you can make is as funny as the sight of Burns staring at computer models and furrowing his brow).

As "time waves" change the future one setpiece at a time, bringing everything from carnivorous bugs to hybrid baboon-raptors, the movie gives you time to think about conundrums that Bradbury's brief tale glossed over, namely: How come shooting a dinosaur doesn't change the course of history, but stepping on a butterfly does?

Early on, we hear some dialogue hinting at moral context-"What's the point of being rich if you don't buy things other people can't afford?" one time-tripping businessman asks-but it goes nowhere. And the film's handling of Bradbury's haunting metaphor for technology and arrogance crushing beauty is prosaic and crummy. This movie is like a heavy boot, stomping on one of science fiction's most idealistic and provocative images.