Fussy tale of defiant resilience
The Keeping Room Running time: 1hr 35min Starring: Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld, Sam Worthington DIRECTED BY Daniel Barber PRODUCED BY Jordan Horowitz THE TITLE sounds like a grim horror movie, but The Keeping Room is actually a revisionist siege Western, examined from an atypical female point of view. Centred by a haunted yet tough performance from Brit Marling, the film is set in 1865 in rural South Carolina at the waning end of the Civil War. The movie is larded with brutality toward women, almost to numbing extremes.
Daniel Barber opens with a visceral jolt as the Yankees, Moses (Sam Worthington) and Henry (Kyle Soller), violate and mow down a white woman and kill two slaves, torching their wagon. Accompanied by their vicious Doberman, the renegade soldiers loot a trail of farms, stores and backwoods saloons, guzzling as much moonshine as they can find. The mystery figure of a black Union soldier on horseback (Nicholas Pinnock) is glimpsed throughout, destined to converge with ill timing on the same isolated farm as the Yankees.
That farm is home to sisters Augusta (Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and slave, Mad (Muna Otaru). With the siblings’ mother deceased, and the men and farmhands all gone off to war and presumed dead, the women have had to learn to fend for themselves.
Augusta has become the stoical head of the household to whom the others look for security. But when teenage Louise gets injured and becomes ill, her protective older sister is forced to ride to a nearby townfor medicine. While Augusta’s selfpossession gets her out of a perilous situation, she has caught the eye of Moses, drawing them to the farm. The inevitable showdown ain’t pretty.
There are the rudiments of a gripping tale, about women rejecting passive roles traditionally assigned to them, along with the injustices visited upon them, taking charge of their own safety, dignity and destiny.
But Barber can’t get out of his own way long enough to tell the story. Instead, we get the same note of drawn-out dread played to the point where it switches from ominous to tedious, dulling the suspense, with the occasional mumbled line or two providing minimal insight into the characters.
It’s all so studied that what should be a wrenching account of one young woman’s personal horror, symbolising that of many, just points to the hand of the writer hard at work. When the battle-scarred farm holdouts bear arms and turn aggressors, Hart doesn’t trust the audience to read the women’s actions for themselves. Instead, she imposes blunt subtext signifiers on them.
The cast is not a problem. Soller and Worthington convey the idea of men hollowed out by the cruelty of war. Steinfeld is mostly confined to pouting or whimpering, while newcomer Otaru manages to sketch a backstory despite having most of it relegated to one monologue.
But the most compelling presence is Marling, who brings her idiosyncratic expressivity and economy of means to Augusta, forced to grow up fast but aware of the experiences she has skipped along the way. With their tangle of tresses, their tattered sack dresses and breeches, these women make striking heroines. But they deserve a movie that tells their tale of defiant resilience with less fuss and more narrative drive. – Hollywood Reporter