The Keeping Room is a home invasion story about predatorial men besieging women in a farmhouse. It’s violent, and murderous, as such stories often are, whether they are fiction or non-fiction. But stories about bad men preying on women with sexual and physical violence are also familiar. As a siege story, this movie doesn’t have much variation to offer.
If The Keeping Room is compelling, it largely results from the film’s doubling as a war film. The movie’s epigraph, from General William Tecumseh Sherman, proclaims that war is cruelty, and that “the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” If war is cruelty as a means to further an end, then the cruelty on display in The Keeping Room portends that war is all around us.
Is this terrifying? Or trite? The difference is often minimal, and I think audiences will be split about The Keeping Room.
Regardless, war and cruelty was everywhere in 1865. The Keeping Room is set during the waning months of the Civil War, in an unnamed Southern location. The men are gone, fighting a war that is already lost. Augusta (Brit Marling) and her young sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) keep their home, along with their slave woman Mad (Muna Otaru).
Director Daniel Barber and his photographer Martine Ruhe (the true star of this film) capture the picturesque nature of three women and their long, slow days. Introducing the women on the farm, Ruhe takes a page from Terrence Malick, shooting Steinfeld in a white dress on a swing in the grass, as her sister walks in the trees. There is such beauty in the films first thirty minutes that one might, possibly forget The Keeping Room’s opening scene: a slave woman and a dog bark at each other; two Yankees (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller) appear, kill a woman, the barking slave woman, and another man on a cart.
Julia Hart’s screenplay will eventually pit these men against the women on the farm. The two Yankees will come upon the women, intending to rape, murder, and make way for the fires of General Sherman behind them. There is siege and a defense, and the violence enabled by both positions.
Hart’s screenplay made the Black List in 2012, which names the best un-produced screenplays in Hollywood. It’s easy to see why this story would appeal to readers. Hart’s women are richly and distinctly written; each is allowed to carry her individuality even as the circumstances around them become ever more troubling. Hart’s women are also allowed a modernity and power that makes The Keeping Room something more than just a period drama (Hart has called this a “revisionist edge” to her history).
The distance between this Civil War story and a post-apocalyptic survivalist story is minute, another modern angle given satisfying exploration by Hart’s screenplay. Our history has already experienced apocalyptic nightmares. Avoid mention of the war, and this could be any zombie apocalypse or YA apocalyptic landscape. At one point Augusta wonders this aloud. “What if this is the end of the world and we are the only one’s left?”
Hart’s screenplay has intrigue, and makes a compelling look back. But it is far from perfect. She has a tendency to fall into speechifying at odd times. Both Augusta and Mad have long speeches they deliver to the others. While Marling and Otaru handle the scenes well, and the monologues themselves are heartbreaking, the momentum gets lost in the weaving thematic speeches. This is a thriller, at heart, and tougher choices should have been made in that regard.
Barber, too, has trouble finding just the right direction. If Hart’s screenplay gets too speechy, Barber counters that with too many long, knowing stares. Brit Marling spends half of The Keeping Room giving pregnant pauses and looks full of meaning; the problem is that the audiences aren’t looking for meaning in the silence of the film. We have been sent the messages, and they are well received.
For all the promise that The Keeping Room offered in its first third, their is a flaccid quality to its violence. This is a home invasion film, and a Civil War story; it seeks to overturn gender expectations and provocatively insert modern qualities of feminism into the final moments of our nations most violent, horrific history. For all that, this should be better.
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