The Keeping Room is about two sisters and their slave trying to avoid two Union soldier scouts who are basically raping and killing anyone who crosses their path. When I saw description for The Keeping Room, my instincts even screamed to run the other way, but I didn’t. I hoped that women kicking butt would outweigh the historical false narrative of Southern female solidarity regardless of race during the Civil War, but it didn’t.
I didn’t take my own advice: unless Brit Marling is involved explicitly as a writer, skip the film. I thought that because another woman wrote The Keeping Room, and Marling starred in it, The Keeping Room would not be awful, but it was.
Of course, some Union soldiers raped women during the Civil War-mostly black women, but of course some white women. My problem isn’t with the premise of The Keeping Room that the Union soldiers committed acts of sexual violence, which is not OK even in a just war. The Keeping Room is problematic for several reasons. First, The Keeping Room suggests that it is war that perverted romance into sexual violence, and under different circumstances, one of the rapists could have been the main character’s true love. Um, no. No!
Second, The Keeping Room also makes the threat of rape an issue primarily faced by white women. Yes, the slave woman gets to talk about her rape by Southerners, but the visual message of The Keeping Room is clear. If you’re a black woman, you’re going to get beaten and shot, but a white woman will be raped and shot whereas in real life, black women were more vulnerable to rape than white women in the Civil War. If The Keeping Room didn’t make rape a central issue, I wouldn’t care about accuracy in the representation of the threat, but it does, so I do.
Third, The Keeping Room suggests that the Civil War awakened Southern white women to their gendered oppression, erased all stigmas of racism and created a solidarity between them and their soon to be former property. Um, no, Jim Crow laws seem to suggest otherwise. Could it have happened ever? Sure. Was it what happened in the majority of the South? Nope, not even a little bit. I’m sorry, but I’m not into the anachronism of post-modern encouragement of female solidarity. It is just revisionist history and erases a painful reality that must be acknowledged and atoned for before there can be solidarity.
Fourth, if someone is trying to rape and kill you, and by some miracle, you get the jump on a soldier and knock him unconscious, you would not wait until later to shoot him, you would shoot him right then and there while you have the upper hand.
Fifth, Sam Worthington is so blah. He is not bad. He is not good. He is neutral, and he is central to the movie.
Skip The Keeping Room. The Keeping Room’s frustrating story outweighs any of its accomplishments such as the acting performances.