Similarity to Safety of Objects

Keane sort of reminded of Timothy Olyphant's character Randy in Safety of Objects. There's enough ambiguity that you question if the guy is unbalanced enough to kidnap a child, or if he's just trying to relive some horrible experience to get closure in his life. There's an edge to Lewis' portrayal to suggest that he could be trying to understand (or justify) something bad he did in his past. Child molesters are very manipulative. I wasn't convinced that Keane was a parent in the past. He knew how relate to kids, yes, but he might have been a lot sicker than meets the eye. Patterns usually exist for a reason. The newspaper articles he carried around might have been an imagined scenario he placed himself into where could play hero/saviour where otherwise he would just be considered creepy. I was glad that he did the right thing in the end. The director might have kept some of this out of the picture, but he did imply that there might be something more to Keane than we know. Obviously, if he made the film darker, there would have been outrage about the subject matter, but because he focused on Keane's loneliness and schizophrenic symptoms, we tend to have compassion rather than revulsion for this man. I do think he made the whole kidnapping thing up, even if he did have a daughter in the past to try to deal with the consquences of his isolation from society. I may be off-base, but I think the ambiguity is what made the film so good. The suspense of not knowing which way he would go and what was driving him in reality. The acting was poignant and riveting. Damian Lewis is incredibly multi-dimensional in his acting. He really should have won some awards for this.