‘Merry Gentleman’: Michael Keaton is a pleasant surprise

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Don’t look now, but Michael Keaton, of all people, has turned into one of the more interesting actors we’ve got.

Or rather, by all means, do look now, because after a year and a half floating around festivals and distribution limbo, Keaton’s debut as a director, “The Merry Gentleman,” opens today. Combine it with his truly extraordinary and unexpected performance as CIA uber-spy James Jesus Angleton in last year’s “The Company” on TNT, and you’ve got an actor who seems to have made a complete turn from what we’ve come to expect.

Until the last few years, Keaton’s career was fueled by the increasingly evaporating fumes of “Mr. Mom,” the “Batman” franchise and “Beetlejuice.” You knew how much more he wanted from it when you’d see movies like “Clean and Sober” and “One Good Cop,” but, to be honest, until “The Company,” I had trouble taking Keaton seriously as anything other than a very lucky and mildly talented wiseacre.

You’ve never seen Keaton before the way he is in “The Merry Gentleman.” He doesn’t have all that many lines to say in the film. And those he has, he seems to say only with the most tortuous reluctance and quietude. In truth, he probably couldn’t have gotten away with this performance with anyone else in the director’s chair, but directing himself he knew what he was doing.

He plays a suicidal hit man in Chicago, a weirdly dapper little man with a cap and goatee and no excessive facial expressions whatsoever.

The first thing we see him do is fix a vandalized yuletide creche. The second is to hold a gun under his chin. The third is to stand on a roof and shoot a victim in an office building across the street.

Then he makes a feint at suicide again — until, that is, he’s frightened by a shout from the street and falls backward.

The shouter was a receptionist in the building, a woman with a thick Scottish burr (Kelly Macdonald) who’s secretly on the lam from an abusive cop husband (Bobby Cannavale).

When she later tells a cop (Tom Bastounes) about the suicidal fellow she saw far up on the ledge of the roof, he begins to put two and two together and eventually figures out that the almost-suicide was the killer of the guy elsewhere in the building.

Don’t think you’ve got this movie pigeonholed, because you don’t — not by a long shot. Our suicidal killer is also, in his day job, a custom tailor. He begins to stalk the one witness who might have been able to identify him. Instead of killing her, though, he realizes she never got a good look and becomes her protector while the new cop in her life — a self-described overweight divorced alcoholic — closes in on them both.

The movie, then, is all about the quirks and dangers of life as they swirl around this young woman who asked for none of it.

The “good men” in her life are, at best, ambiguous. The secret killer in her life is the one who quietly looks out for her — and gets her help in return.

It means that the movie rises and falls on the charms of Macdonald, and those charms are as plentiful as they are unconventional.

Keaton the director fills the movie with quiet ironies and salient silences. The only time an actor comes close to exploding is when one character suddenly shows up out of nowhere to announce he has been born again.

It’s a sneaky little film. Nothing close to major is happening — not even the announcement of Keaton as a burgeoning director — but it’s more memorable in its oddity than a lot of bigger films with a much more professional finish.•

jsimon@buffnews.com

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