Jason Patric
“KEYHOLE” My rating: C (Opens May 4 at the Crown Center)
90 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Keyhole” is the weirdest movie Guy Maddin has yet made…which is saying a lot.
In many regards it is vintage Maddin — shot in black and white on claustrophobic sets, marked by dynamic editing and a bizarre soundtrack, and acted by performers who do their best not to be naturalistic.
The problem is that “Keyhole” lacks what may be the most crucial element of Maddin’s style — his bizarre sense of humor. There are stabs at grim hilarity here, but they don’t take. Overall, this is a brooding, dark and largely joyless enterprise.
It’s set in a falling-down mansion in what is apparently the 1930s. A group of gangsters and their molls armed with pistols and Tommyguns take refuge in the parlor. It’s night and outside a raging lightning storm competes with the flashing lights of police cars surrounding the house to create a hallucinogenic atmosphere.
They have with them a young man who has been bound and gagged. Apparently he’s a hostage. Several of the hoods are wounded and dying. They’ve come here to await the arrival of their boss, Ulysses.
Ulysses (Jason Patric) finally shows up leading a young blind woman (Brooke Palsson). This is his home — or it was — and now he’s determined to fine his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) who still resides there.
Remember the Red Room sequences from David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”? Well, “Keyhole” is like 90 minutes of that disorientation.
Problem is, the entire massive building is like an amusement park funhouse and is populated with ghosts that the living must negotiate around. Ulysses moves from room to room, with each new setting triggering memories of his life and lost family.
Upstairs Hyacinth lies in a bed with her aged father, who is naked except for the chains that wrap him like Marley’s Ghost. The old man is, in fact, a ghost. But is Hyacinth as well?
“Keyhole” is fascinating and irritating in equal measure. It seems to take its structure in part from “The Odyssey” (the husband seeking the wife he left behind to go off to war), but it adheres very loosely to Homer’s tale. Like many of Maddin’s films it’s about family and alienation and the subconscious.
But Maddin’s approach is so studied and stylized that it’s impossible to become emotionally invested in the proceedings. For a while the sheer technical innovation he brings to bear carries the project along. But after a while the viewer’s interest segues into somnambulism.
| Robert W. Butler
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