"The Keep"

The Keep

Directed by Michael Mann

35mm print at BAM (2/9/16)

I haven't used this blog in 14 months, but what better reason to revive it than to share my highly sought-after musings on Michael Mann?

I really wanted to call The Keep direly under-loved, or champion it as Michael Mann's early, eccentric, misunderstood masterpiece. I wanted to tell everyone, "You're wrong! This is better than Manhunter!" It's ripe for "reevaluation": it hasn't yet received a spiffy Blu-Ray treatment, or a Criterion exhumation, or any sort of restoration, or (to my knowledge) any limited edition Mondo posters, which is how you truly evaluate a film's artistic merit. It doesn't screen often, and has accrued a sort of enigmatic non-legacy as a curiosity for Mann fans (who showed up en masse for the film's 35mm screening at BAM Tuesday night). The Keep has the proper backstory (producers hijacking the film from its auteur) and esoteric appeal to be a cult classic. But The Keep isn't a masterpiece. It's Mann's only truly bad movie. And yet something draws me to The Keep.

The movie is sumptuous, a banquet of assiduously-staged images. I want to say "it looks gorgeous," but that's too simplistic an extrapolation; it flaunts some of Mann's most pervasive proclivities (is Mannersisms too cute?), like emotionless men staring off stoically, and people running in slow motion, and a long take of a boat gliding across the sky-black water, and it has a handful of shots that can hold their own against anything in Manhunter or Heat. This is maybe the most carefully-storyboarded movie of Mann's career, which is saying something. There's nary a single shot that doesn't feel carefully considered. But often these immaculately composed and lit shots are incoherently cobbled together into a hodgepodge of rampant stupidity played with tone deaf seriousness. A few scenes (or, really, single shots within otherwise inane scenes) are undeniably astounding -- what the kids call "jaw-dropping." I've seen the movie before, but my jaw dropped a few times, particularly during the early showstopper, a long, long, long pull-back that gives us our first glimpse of the vast catacombs that harbor The Keep's man-in-a-rubber-suit monster. It's show-offy, sure, but it's not masturbatory. (Mann-sturbatory?) The first few seconds of the shot elicit the feeling of being lost in a black abyss, as the Nazi's lamp recedes into the distance, a lone yellow speck against the blackness. But the shot keeps going, and it keeps going, and it keeps going until the feint semblance of a quarry appears at the bottom of the frame, and it keeps going until it finally comes to a rest, and a nebulous body of light rushes from below us in a fury across the abyss towards the Nazi, which results in his head exploding. Or something.  

 

Other great moments, either sincerely or ironically, in no particular order: that opening shot, forever-falling from the sickly sky to the trees to a convoy of Nazis while Tangerine Dream's synths pulsate (the score is wildly uneven and sometimes sounds like a Reagan-Era soap opera); another long take that swings across a huge room speckled with nickel crosses until it lands, in close-up, on a weird bearded old man, who turns out to be the worst actor ever; the monster-demon-thing moving through the halls as a snake-like smoke thing, which would have been done with CGI if The Keep was made today; a carefully staged shot of Ian McKellen holding out his hand, because it looks cool; Ian McKellen saying, "Look at my hands, my face!" and acting so hard; Ian McKellen carrying a flashlight cross thing (I really didn't understand most of the movie); Scott Glenn as the quintessential unfeeling Mann man, telling a woman, "Shh, sleep," and using his magic glowing blue eyes to sedate her after sleeping with her; Alberta Watson's bizarrely delayed, "What?" reaction, as if she, too, is befuddled by the crap she has to say.

The main problem with The Keep is how seriously the super-serious Mann treats the pulp material. Hand this script to John Carpenter and maybe you get something more self-aware. It's hard to take Ian McKellen talking to a rubber demon seriously. And the actors are all acting so hard -- Jesus, Scott Glenn, have you ever had sex before? What are you doing to Albert Watson? Mann would go on to make some really sexy movies, but The Keep isn't one of them. Though Robert Prosky is kind of a hottie.