This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies . To read this review at its original source, click here .

When we first meet Kate (Kelly Macdonald), she is nursing a lavender shiner. It doesn’t take us long to figure out that her abusive husband (Bobby Cannavale) is responsible, a cop sworn to serve and protect but who instead takes out his frustrations on his wife’s face. Kate flees her home and heads to Chicago to start a new life. While leaving work one night, she happens to glance up at the falling snow and catches sight of a man standing on the ledge of a building across the street, poised to jump. Luckily, Kate’s scream scares him off the roof, an act her co-worker deems nothing less than a “Christmas miracle.”

The man is Frank (Michael Keaton), a melancholy, contract killer of few words (it’s half an hour in before we hear him speak). Business is booming and Frank is knocking off targets right and left, including one in Kate’s building with a sniper rifle just moments before she catches sight of him. But it isn’t enough that Frank kills others — he wants to kill himself as well. And he very well may have too, had Kate not intervened.

Some time later, Frank “coincidently” meets Kate in front of her apartment building. Has he come to assassinate her and ensure she cannot identify him to the police who have already been asking her a lot of questions or is he merely fascinated by his guardian angel? Whatever the reason, she doesn’t recognize him and he ends up helping her carry her cumbersome Christmas tree up the flights of stairs to her apartment.

So begins a most unlikely friendship, more paternal than romantic. Both Frank and Kate are utterly lonely and utterly alone. Craving contact, they fall into step with one another, not saying much, but just glad to have another beating heart in the room. Both are obviously very wounded people, clutching to secrets with vice-like grips — she, her abusive history and he, his profession.

But Frank isn’t the only man interested in Kate. Dave (Tom Bastounes), a cop investigating the murder at her office, is smitten. As their weird little ménage a trois grows, Dave becomes suspicious of Frank. Part of it is jealousy, part of it is instinct. As Dave begins putting the pieces together, Kate is faced with an impossible decision, all the more complicated by the sudden reappearance of her sadistic husband.

The Merry Gentleman, directed by Keaton in his first time behind the camera, borrows its title from the fact that the majority of the film takes place over the Christmas season. The ironic thing is that no one in this film is remotely merry. Kate would be if she weren’t terrified that every time she looked over her shoulder, her husband would be there. Frank would be if he’d stop extinguishing others’ lives. And Dave would be if he’d only manage to get a handle on his alcoholism, over-eating and chain smoking. Instead, everyone is this twisted little triangle is miserable, making for a joyless Christmas and, for some perhaps, a downer of a film.

But The Merry Gentleman is not meant to be a downer. Although the film is deliberately—some may say very slowly—psychologically paced, saturated in cold blues and grays, and shot in locations deliberately chosen to show urban decomposition, The Merry Gentleman is actually quite a sweet movie, that holds its power close to its vest and shouts in silence rather than whispers in the storm.

The acting in The Merry Gentleman is uniformly terrific. Macdonald, last seen in No Country for Old Men, has always been nothing short of perfect. Her natural kindheartedness and warmth, coupled with an expression of innate goodness (and terrific Scottish accent) shines through in every scene. Bastounes imbues Dave with the perfect mixture of crumbling self-worth and resolute morality. And Keaton, who has had as eclectic a career as anyone I can think of, gives us a spare, hollowed out man. This is not some sort of “killer with a heart of gold;” Frank has simply grown weary of pain—both inflicting it and feeling it—and yearns for the warmth of humanity again.

I was reminded, watching Frank and Kate’s dance, of Charlotte and Bob in the achingly beautiful Lost in Translation. Both films involve relationships between men and women of very different ages who encounter each other during times of profound loneliness and confusion, and form a kind of love that eschews the physical for the metaphysical. While The Merry Gentleman does not nearly convince us of the reasons behind the characters’ attraction to each other (Keaton has so few lines, how could it?) we extrapolate their feelings from the great swaths of silence. What is spoken is not nearly as important as what goes unsaid.

The end of The Merry Gentleman is swaddled in ambiguity and, if I am honest, a certain degree of dissatisfaction. Some films start in medius rez (in the middle of things); this one ends in it. It is not the lack of resolution that is troubling, so much as the feeling that several scenes have gone missing, that the final chapters of the novel you’ve been enjoying have been pulled from the spine of the book and discarded somewhere just tantalizingly out of reach.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.