“We have our laws and punishments, the streets have theirs,” Officer Teddy Sharpe (Lou Diamond Phillips) tells his new partner Sandra (Dana Namerode) after it becomes obvious he’s not about to make an effort to remove a man trapped in the back of a trunk, who himself isn’t especially eager to get out in “Keep Quiet,” loathe to further upset the brutish man keeping him captive from his front porch. Experience has suggested that this hands off approach to policing has kept the peace over the years in this corner of the midwest where Teddy has jurisdiction as part of the Thunderstone Tribal Police, but has to also consider the occasional encroachment of the local department just off the reservation as well as the circumstances of the Native community where a healthy distrust of any authority has made it likely for intervention to make any bad situation that much worse.
It is thorny territory not only for the police, but one could imagine writer Zach Montague and director Vincent Grashaw as well, given the sensitivities involved in the subject matter, but then again Grashaw has never shied away from such material as a means of exploring how much people are a product of their surroundings and after his ferocious debut “Coldwater,” set in a teen reformatory, and his follow-up “Before I Go” about a school shooting, he’s the right filmmaker for a bleak but brawny thriller that takes its setting seriously. In a place where everyone knows one another and justice is administered as much by freezing people out within families as making an arrest, the film is built around the unwanted return of Richie (Elisha Pratt), a genuine bad seed that has reached parole after a prison stretch and looks to get back into his old life. As his grandmother Chelsea (Irene Bedard) says, “Of all the children I’ve lost, he’s the one that’s dead to me,” seeing his release as an extra bit of bad news on top of burying her grandson Bradley, who committed suicide not long after his mother took her own life, and she can only hope that his brother Albert (Lane Factor) can avoid the influence of any of his relatives.
Montague and Grashaw deliver on any procedural expectations when Teddy and Sandra are drawn into a reckoning with Richie, who is causing too much trouble around town to ignore and inevitably makes things personal by reaching out to Albert. But “Keep Quiet” has an unexpected gear when including how difficult it is to break a cycle of hopelessness for the community, positioning both Richie and Teddy as two sides of the same coin when one particular effort to do something different backfired spectacularly and led both to harden in ways particular to them. It seems like the story could go the way of “Training Day” when Teddy’s casual attitude towards policing can appear irresponsible in the eyes of the rookie in his midst, but the film impressively turns a corner without being overly sentimental when all characters involved can be seen defining a moral line for themselves after being at a loss for one that’s more generally accepted and the pursuit of justice is in itself is a reflection of that optimism hasn’t been abandoned entirely.
Phillips looks as comfortable in the no-nonsense role of Teddy as the cop does in the part he plays tending to a community he’s spent decades in, and the actor’s swagger sets the tone for the drama where everyone is as tough as their circumstances require, allowing for juicy turns in bit parts for Bedard and Tommy Schultz, who plays a confidant of Teddy’s at a key moment. Although the character of Richie may be a little thinly drawn as pure evil, Pratt drops in small pockets of the person he could’ve been if things turned out differently and the villain becomes a reflection of a much larger and more complex looming threat. Beyond the creation of criminals caused by endemic poverty and lack of opportunity, there is no obvious path towards reintegration into society, and when Grashaw has long been interested in the misalignment of crime and punishment, “Keep Quiet” changes up the conversation around it in exciting new ways, even as it has the bones of a classic Western.
“Keep Quiet” will screen again at the Locarno Film Festival on August 15th at 11 am at La Sala and August 16th at 4:30 pm at Teatro Kursaal.