Well, Keaton stars in (and directed) last year's The Merry Gentleman, which I saw, despite the fact of Keaton's non-existence. I had no idea this movie even existed until I saw it on a list of underappreciated gems of 2009. After watching it, I'm not surprised that (a) I never heard of it, and (b) it ended up on a list of underappreciated gems. I'm still not sure whether I liked it or not, but I can confirm that Michael Keaton does, in fact, exist, and that, in a perfect world, a film like this would get more appreciation than it has.

Mild spoilers follow. My vague, non-spoiler take: it's an unusual film that appears to mix up a lot of familiar genres without really doing so. See it if you like movies about loneliness, where the characters do a lot of walking around town alone, being lonely. Read on for a more detailed, but slightly more spoilery, discussion.

This isn't the kind of movie that puts butts in seats. It's not cult classic material, either. It's hard to know what to make of it, actually. When I hear a film described as a "small, intimate character drama," I imagine a Living, Loving & Learning™ movie, usually starring some combination of Catherine Keener, Laura Linney, and Patricia Clarkson, and involving people doing a lot of talking over a succession of brunches.

The Merry Gentleman isn't like that at all, and yet it sort of is, too. It's a bizarre mixture of a bunch of different mainstream genres that somehow ends up like none of them.

The plot sounds like something spit out by an automated Hollywood movie script generator. A suicidal hit man (Keaton), about to jump off the roof of a building (where he's just finished his latest assignment), is inadvertently saved by a lonely young woman (Kelly MacDonald) who's hiding out from an abusive ex-husband.

Hit man and lonely girl end up friends, but their budding relationship is complicated by a police detective (investigating the hit) who falls for the girl. Then there's the ex-husband searching for his runaway wife. Wackiness ensues!

Or not. What's so odd and sometimes frustrating about The Merry Gentleman is that it seems like it's going to be a combination of gangster flick, romantic comedy, police procedural, and stalker horror film, but ends up being none of those things. Things you think are leading to something, don't.

There's a storyline about the guys the hit man is whacking, and another one about the cop investigating a murder, and one about an abusive husband, and at some point you realize that none of these are actually storylines. They're just part of the background scenery for this intimate little story of a tenuous connection between two unhappy, lonely people. Which itself doesn't play out entirely the way most intimate little stories of tenuous connections between two unhappy, desperately lonely people play out.

That's why it's not hard to see why this film was "underappreciated." You really have to recalibrate your expectations before seeing this movie. I can't imagine a trailer that would adequately convey what this movie is offering. It's the kind of movie you have to just sort of stumble across in order to enjoy. And by "you" I mean "me."

My personal favorite film "genre," if you can call it that, is movies about loneliness. They have a certain quality of emotional quietness that reminds me of my own mostly solitary childhood. It's not a negative feeling, not like depression, but more like melancholy. At least, that's how I perceive it. Movies like Taxi Driver, Lost in Translation, The Conversation, Cast Away, Midnight Cowboy. It's a tonal thing. That's what The Merry Gentleman has.

The main problem with The Merry Gentleman is that there's too much of the extraneous background plot. It crowds out the real story. There's a sense of menace throughout the movie -- will the creepy ex-husband show up? what's up with those unsavory criminals the hit man's mixed up with? -- that's never resolved, which would be fine if the central relationship between the two lead characters didn't feel similarly thinly sketched out and unresolved. I actually would have been happier if the movie had cut out all of that business and just had the movie be a series of conversations between Keaton and MacDonald. Over brunch.