THE KEEPING ROOM IS UNKEPT
Touted at the beginning as an anti-war film, the plot reveals what happens when soldiers have guns and drink too much—violence for the hell of it. The black-and-white film is set in 1865, around the end of the Civil War. The soldiers, from the North, evidently believe that their mission is to wreak havoc on the South by pillage and violence despite the Lieber Code, which President Abraham Lincoln issued as a guide to avoid war crimes. Three children, meanwhile, live in an isolated farmhouse without their parents, evidently killed in the war, including the family slave Mad (played by Muna Otaru). Two renegade soldiers capture Augusta (Brit Marling) and put her in a makeshift prison, a room within a house (the keeping room). Augusta tries to break free, goes back home, mobilizes the other two children, including her younger sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld), to be ready for the soldiers on a rampage, and has collected guns for their defense. But the action, directed by Daniel Barber, is so stilted and the dialog so muffled that filmviewers will easily fall asleep. MH