The miner of difficult truths
#scurf207: On Catherine Keener's portraits of our thwarted, everyday selves
She’s mostly in my spot. The cool, clumsy, catty person who is in the middle of a deeply personal, isolating emotional crisis she tells no one else abut. Watching her go from one such role to another in a series of movies has given me so much hope, respite. A place to pause and breathe. Catherine Keener often plays these bourgeois, slightly artistic, mostly introverted people who are like me, you and someone we all know. There’s a strange zest she brings to each of these roles, infusing them with a humanity that’s otherwise relegated only to the lead roles.
Through her films, I see women who are far from perfect. Adrift, alienated, cold. Keener seems to play them from a place of deep empathy, almost as if she learned the place they come from. Watching her be them is like observing a time capsule from a person’s life, peering into their living room without their knowledge on any given day and coming back soaked in a whiff of their persona. Keener populates my American filmic universe with women of varied anxieties, single mothers sitting on stoops, clumsy muses and women in repose.
Movies with her that I saw recently (Enough Said; The 40-year old Virgin; Walking and Talking; Please Give; Friends with Money; and a bunch of others) ooze with this sense of belonging. An other-worldly way in which she makes these flawed people, and by extension, us, hers. The unothering of others. In these films Keener seems to give off a scent of empathy; she holds a longstanding faith not only in the power of others, the knowledge of their wildly personal, peculiar personhoods, but also in the power and the necessity of articulating the deepest language that makes a self. I guess then that is what is needed to be an artist.
There’s a hypersensitivity she makes conspicuous, holding each of these people through a prismatic lens and casting not a shadow of their selves on to film, but drawing out a whole, lived-in reality. In a sea of actors who love to ham, haw, huff their way through these onscreen lives, Keener often playing side roles, sticks out as that sincere, earnest person. In Friends with Money, for instance, she shines like a diamond between Jennifer Anniston’s nasal hamming and Frances McDormand’s arrogant whining. She’s sincere, articulate and so humane.
I think it also helps that Keener’s characters are often cast in the mold of the sensitive person, someone a littler precocious, someone prone to affectations and anxieties that often plague the dwindling modern person. Wafting through the unsteadying days and nights, watching Keener draw those intimate, often accurate portraits of people like me onscreen I’ve felt steadied by her presence. She feels like the friend I’ve longed to always have — articulate yet scattered, frizzy-haired, slightly grizzly and deeply ponderous about the world around her. What she does onscreen is very much “acting” but it is by way of visualizing a world that some of us have known a little closely.
During my most confused, idle days I’ve felt drawn deeper into the morasses of her films; her work almost becoming both a gateway into life and a bulwark against everything that was in the way of me having one. Sometimes I feel that she should’ve acted in more films, played more lead roles, but would then her work have struck the same chord with me? I’m guessing not. She’s served her talents, nurtured them by working with some of the most revered filmmakers of our times. In that she has protected herself, protected us, especially at a time when a talent of this kind, if spread too far and wide could be viewed as a threat.
In her practice as an actor, Keener is a realist, focusing on what the impressionists often tend to leave out — the desperation, humiliations and introversions of our daily lives. She portrays the daily emotional bankruptcy of people like me, our solitary dereliction, selfish ugliness with an anthropological ease. And sometimes, like in Enough Said, she dares and goes further, bringing out the emotional gutbucket, mining our difficult truths onscreen.
There’s a nakedness to her Adele in Synecdoche, New York, for instance. During my rewatch of the film last night, I could sense Keener’s deep feeling for all that she is not. Adele seems almost to have been rendered from some place below the surface of objective looking. There’s an eeriness to her Adele, a cold, unnerving and nightmarish sense of being a muse. A pulsing sense of the other, again. In the hands of a lesser actor she would’ve frizzled, evaporated and disappeared in the shell of the actor. But Keener preserves Adele like the flicker of a lamp on a stormy night.
One wonders then, what the wellspring of her acting, training, being is — the subconscious? the heart? Or just plain isolation? A very easy generalisation about great character artists is that they are always, in some way, playing themselves. Keener’s genius, I believe, is to make us understand not just her interest in her subjects but why we are interested in one another as people. Someday I’d want to host a Keener film festival from my part of this world, trying to reveal to the world her too many artistic layers.
Her characters never let you rest, and why should they? She’s never resting. She always seems to be reaching, aiming for something more, something further ahead through these films. Love, perhaps, always at the precipice of knowing her craft better. Though it is never safety or security, that she is going for, they seem like an anathema to her artistic corpus. There is also a spiritual component to her work; her intense and casual portraits feel like a rite of passage that she wants her audience to walk through to meet their own selves. At times, her focus, her desire to understand who her subjects are and, by extension, who you might be, can have you rushing out of the cinemas for a breath of air. And that in itself is my panacea for these days!