Posted: 09/10/2006

The Legend of Lucy Keyes

(2006)

by Karen Petruska

John Stimpson based the screenplay for his 2006 ghost story The Legend of Lucy Keyes on the real-life disappearance of a young girl in 1755 in Massachusetts. Four-year-old Lucy was walking with her sisters in the woods, but she lagged behind and her sisters returned without her. She was never found. Her mother was driven crazy by her grief and reportedly wandered the woods each night searching for her lost girl. Of course, people today claim to hear the voice of the mother, searching still.

Stimpson wrote and directed the film that incorporates the legend of Lucy Keyes into its modern story about a couple struggling to overcome the accidental death of their youngest child. Having moved from the city to the woods of Massachusetts, Jeanne Cooley (Julie Delpy) cares for daughters Molly and Lucy while her husband Guy (Justin Theroux) begins work implementing a proposed windmill field. Not all the town residents are happy with this proposal, however, and Jeanne determines to learn the cause of their anxiety and the source of the mysterious voice she hears calling the name “Lucy” at night.

The first half of the film is darn intriguing. Stimpson’s story provides an effective basis for a supernatural tease, and the naturalistic acting draws our empathy and affection for the young family under siege. Jeanne is haunted by the death of her third child: killed when she wandered into the street and was hit by a car. Unable to connect with her husband and terrified of harm coming to her other two children, Jeanne is uniquely situated to understand the grief of long deceased Martha Keyes, rumored to haunt the woods surrounding Jeanne’s house.

As portrayed by Delpy, Jeanne is constantly on edge and emotionally delicate, awaiting the next tragedy that may completely destroy her. Oddly, Stimpson never employs Delpy’s French accent to highlight her outsider identity, even though parallels abound within a story about a city woman trying to build a life among townsfolk who have inhabited the land for hundreds of years. We glimpse only one moment of her past life, a fractured flashback of the moment her daughter was killed. Without a context for the life she has given up, it is more difficult to fully grasp Delpy’s fractured psychology.

Justin Theroux’s character is less developed still. He comes off as oblivious: never hearing the haunting sounds that keep his wife awake and completely trusting of the value of his work, despite much evidence that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark. That something rotten is made quite explicit in the clam bellies stored by his hermit neighbor that stink up the surrounding property. Touches like this are quite nice when Stimpson allows their metaphoric meaning to exist as hint and subtext. But as the film progresses, Stimpson tires too hard to tie all the plotlines together and loses some of this evocative layering.

The town is populated by a whole cast of eccentrics: the aforementioned hermit neighbor (portrayed with a remarkable gruff insecurity by Mark Boone Junior), the cowed Keyes descendant Sheila (a wasted Michele Greene), and town lunatic Gretchen Caswell (Jamie Donnelly). Caswell alternates between gentle and menacing, but her scenes with Jeanne tend to be cut off before any real information can be delivered. Her main piece of useful information must be delivered in the mail, a weak device for forwarding a plot. Stimpson seems fearful that if he allows Jeanne and Caswell to talk for too long, the mystery will unravel, yet in this fear he misses the potential human conflict between the two women: should Jeanne trust Caswell, what is Caswell’s true motive, and may she have a stake in this mystery as well?

Stimpson effectively manipulates the usual environmental haunts: eerie wind, slamming barn doors, and mysterious figures in the night. Though there is some redundancy to the structure of the film (Jeanne investigates during the day but is haunted at night…repeat), his tantalizing spook effects arouse curiosity and goose bumps. Yet Jeanne’s most climactic encounter with the ghost fails to deliver the frightening effect of these simple devices. Within this climactic scene, the erratic editing confuses, the menace fails to deliver consequences, and most troubling, the motivation behind the ghostly apparition is vague at best.

Ghost stories have to make a choice: either the ghost is real or the mystery is explained by natural phenomena. Stimpson attempts to incorporate a bit of the former and the latter, diluting the effectiveness of both. The film’s strength resides in the ambiguous space in between, when we aren’t sure if all the townsfolk are indeed crazy or if some diabolical plan has convinced them of a haunting. The human emotion that underlies the ghost story of The Legend of Lucy Keyes—the grief suffered by a mother—can be quiet moving. But Stimpson ultimately gets bogged down in the complexities of his resolution, losing the authenticity of his characters.

Still, the film is entertaining, and the combination of Julie Delpy and Justin Theroux creates a sympathetic coupling. Though not a perfect ghost story, Stimpson’s Legend offers a stimulating mystery and a wonderful ensemble.

Karen Petruska is a film critic living in Chicago.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com