The Keeping Room (2014)

Well this was a waste of my time. I don't know why The Keeping Room gets good ratings because this is just a dumb movie. It's extremely slow, with not much going on. It's full of inconsistencies that I won't mention here because it's just not worth of it. The actors are mediocre. I won't cry if I never see them acting again. The story is really boring, i even fell asleep for a couple minutes. Would I watch this one again? Certainly not. I even wrote it down to make sure that I won't make the same mistake again. Don't waste your time on this one because there are plenty of better movies in the same style then this one.

Fmovies: A thinly plotted , mainly slow but often tense Civil War piece with three fine lead performances and a good rather different one from Sam Worthington. An interesting take on what happens when law breaks down in a soon to be defeated land.

--but you haven't. Not by a long shot. Muna Otaru's lines alone are worth the entire time spent with this film. She plays a slave who is one of the strongest women of trust in God ever portrayed on the silver screen. Hailee Steinfeld, ultra-famous for playing the precocious youngster in the far superior remake of True Grit, appears in this so-called Western (we have no genre called Southern) as a whimpering, naive, arrogant older teenager--but, as with True Grit and her powerful bit part in The Homesman, she carries the film with equal power to Otaru and Brit Marling (whose wounded-and-crying scene is one of the most realistic I have ever seen). No, you have not seen this film done time and again. You have never seen this story, which reveals the realities of war that we all too often set aside as battlefield anomalies but which, in truth, are always part and parcel of any conflict between two opposing armies. I, for one, would love to see Steinfeld quit the sappy glossy music industry and concentrate all of her talent on making films like this one--or making films in general. She's just so much better at it.

The Keeping Room fmovies. The setting is the South Carolina in the final days of the American Civil War. Three southern women (Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld and Muna Otaru) learn to survive by farming, hunting and other daily chores they are thrust to complete due to the absence of men who are off fighting. Their farm is isolated, so help is not readily available. They must struggle and work to survive.

Their tedious and repetitive days are brought into turmoil when two Yankee scouts (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller) cross paths with the mother patriarch of the trio with expressed devious intentions. With only their home as shelter, the three women must find a way to survive against the two armed soldiers who have already left a murderous path in their wake.

Julia Hart's screenplay for The Keeping Room made the Hollywood Black List back in 2012. But director Daniel Barber (Harry Brown) was resilient in his attempts to bring the strong female story to the screen. Barber wastes no time in garnishing his viewer's attention. The opening scene has a local colored girl being brutally murdered by the two scouts. The shots fired from their rifles and pistols echoed throughout the theatre and caught everyone's attention as the evil of the two antagonists was on quick display. Things take a dramatic turn immediately after as we get introduced to our three female leads and their life alone from rural civilization is dull and uninteresting unable to leverage from its strong lead-in.

All three women put on admirable acting displays, but their motions are of general non-interest to the average movie-goer. Watching them plow, eat, cook, chop woodÂ…. The Fireplace Channel is more interesting and involving than their daily life. Unfortunately, this Little House on the South Carolina Prairie goes on far too long and with little dialogue of single sentence deliveries, the film drags until the tension mounts again with the return of the two soldiers at the home.

We welcomed the piercing gun blasts that echoed the theatre to wake us up from our self-induced coma in the film's final third, but by then it was too late to get us back interested in the characters or their plights.

I would assume that Hart's screenplay and Barber's intentions were to bring a story of strong resilient women to the screen. But we are so bored by their daily routine that we were less inclined to think that these were stout and hardy women but rather three women that finally had something interesting to do. Even is that 'something' was to fight for their lives.

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For people that are interested in black/white history this is a gripping movie; The Keeping Room has a very real-feel. So many movies in trying to be a movie are just that; A MOVIE; and suspending disbelief becomes an effort. Thinking this is an action movie is like driving fast down the motorway; you get to your destination quickly; but miss the scenery. TKR is full of scenery; a feminine treat for men and women alike. Absorb it's slow momentum; the grinding tension of ignorance coupled with power. Ultimately it's a quote that captures the movie "we are all ni99ers now", denoting shifts of power and the casual onset of humility that comes with empathy and desperation.

There's a merit on doing all female leads drama thriller set on volatile era of Civil War, especially when there's social prejudice involved. However, aside from some admittedly fine performance, the movie feels clunky and slow. It doesn't have the intricacy or characterization beyond the basic formula of "there are bad men coming", and even that takes the film about half its runtime to get the pace going.

This is the story of three women, one of whom is colored, as they defend their home from outsiders. Each woman might not be easily relatable at first, but the acting as well as decent investment time to them manage to deliver a few heavy thought provoking and intimate scenes. Brit Marling as the oldest one keeps a strong presence even though her character may be lacking in term of actual strength.

Muna Otaru as Mad, the colored housekeeper or technical maid, has a unique personality as the caretaker of the girls and also her own woman. As for the antagonist Sam Worthington makes do, he's decent but his motivation doesn't have the same focus as the girls', which means less connection to the character as he basically stumbles on the predicament he himself creates. The cinematography works by keeping an intentionally bleak and less stylish version of Wild West.

This is a deliberate pace for drama, not action or thriller. It does feel terribly slow at times, not in a good Tarantino build up style. Furthermore, there's not much cat-and-mouse cerebral standoff, which feels like a missed opportunity, especially when it could've used the setting as intense backdrop. Panic Room with Jodie Foster had trade of wit between protagonist and antagonist that created depth and utilized its premise, while here it's more of random gunslinging action.

The Keeping Room has a couple of good performances, especially geared towards heavy themes such as race prejudice and violence towards women. However, instead of putting more focus on home invasion to elevate the drama, its slow pace removes any thrill to what could've been a powerful commentary of an era and its lingering issues.